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GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 

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HELD IN BONDAGE 


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COMPLETE IN ONE TOLUMK. 

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‘^A youLg man married is a man that's marred," 

SHAKsmams. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 

1900. 



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By Transf §» 

P«0. Dept. 

Mar 9.3 o 

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CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 


PART THE FIRST. 

I. The senior pupil of the Chancery tries the sauce 


piquante of uncertain fate 5 

II. “The heart is a free and a fetterless thing” 13 

III. “A southerly wind and a cloudy sky proclaim it a 

hunting morning” 26 


PART THE SECOND. 

I. The patte de velours strikes its first wound in the 


academic shades of Granta 44 

11. The Major of the Dashers 68 

PART THE THIRD. 

I. How a subtle poison is drank in the champagne at an 

oyster supper 71 

II What was under the cards 95 

HI. A doubled*down page in the Colonel’s book of life 98 

PART THE FOURTH. 

1. The little queen of the fairies 114 

PART THE FIFTH. 

I. How De Vigne courts iron gyves, as though they were 

softest rose chains 131 

PART THE SIXTH. 

I. Some of the Colonel’s philosophy 157 

II. How the man makes his own destiny, and the patte de 

velours strikes its most cruel wound 16C 


(iii) 


i? 


CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 


PART THE SEVENTH. 

I. Sabretasclie studies the belle of the season 178 

II. Tho “charmed life” comes back among us 189 

PART THE EIGHTH. 

T Sabretasche, having mowed down many flowers, de- 
termines to spare one Violet 213 

PART THE NINTH. 

I. How a portfolio was upset in St. James’s Street 236 

II. How a wife talked of her husband 248 

III. How we found the little queen of the fairies in Richmond 

Park 252 

PART THE TENTH. 

I. How Violet Molyneux touched other chords than those 

in her song 269 

II. “L’amiti^ est I’amour sans ailes” 278 

PART THE ELEVENTH. 

I. How De Vigne amuses himself with fencing, and never 

dreams the buttons can fly ofiF 314 

II. Lc chat qui dormait 327 

PART THE TWELFTH. 

I. Paolo and Francesca 344 

II. Palamon and Arcite 355 

PART THE THIRTEENTH. 

I. How Vivian Sabretasche buried his past and awoke to 

a golden present 3yjr 

II. The skeleton that society had never seen 339 

PART THE FOURTEENTH. 

I. One of the summer days before the storm 4O8 

PART THE FIFTEENTH. 

I. How the olden delirium awoke like a giant from his 

slumbers ^27 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


PART THE FIRST. 

I. 


TAB SENIOR PUPIL OF THE CHANCERY TRIES THE SAUCE 
PIQUANTE OF UNCERTAIN FATE. 

The water rushed beneath the keel, our oars dipped with 
regular harmony, the river-waves rippled and split, and the 
alders and willows tossed and waved in the sunshine, while 
we — private pupils, as our tutor called us, young men, as 
we called ourselves — used to pull up the Kennet as though 
we were some of a University Eight, and lunch at our 
favorite hostelry off raw chops and half-and-half, making, 
faute de mieux, rough, schoolboy-love to its big-boned, 
red-haired Hebe, happy as kings in those glorious summer 
days in the dead years long past and gone. 

What a royal time it was — (what man among us does 
not say so with a sigh?) — when our hearts owned no 
heavier cares than a vulgus and a theorem, and no arriere- 
pensee mingled with our healthy boyish sports; when old 
Horace and Euripedes were the only bores we knew, and 
the Galatsea at the pastrycook’s seemed fairer than titled 
Helens now; when gallops on hired shying hacks were 
doubly dear by prohibition, and filthy bird’s-eye, smoked 

1* (5) 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


in barns, sweeter to our senses then than purest Cubas 
smoked to-day on the steps of Arthur’s or the U. S. 
Those were ray happiest days, Heaven knows, though I’ve 
seen life as agreeably as any man could, and am not even 
yet as utterly blase as one might expect. But just as, 
some twenty years hence, when I am gone down before the 
gout, and Purdey has grown too heavy, and my favorite 
entremets are interdicted, shall I look back to the present 
day with an envious sigh ; so do I now often glance with 
a fond lingering regret to those merry boyish days when, 
with a handsome tip from the dear old governor, and a 
parting injunction respecting the unspeakable blessings 
and advantages of flannel from ray mother, I was sent off 
to be a private pupil under the Rev. Josiah Primrose, 
B.D,, F.R.S., F.R.G.S., and all the letters of the alphabet 
besides, I dare say, if I could but remember them. 

Our modern Gamaliel was an immaculate and insignifi- 
cant little 'man, who, on the strength of a double first, 
good connections, and M.B. waistcoats, offered to train up 
the sons of noblemen and gentlemen in the way they should 
go, drill Greek and instil religious principles into them, 
for the trifling consideration of 300/. per annum. He 
lived in a quiet little borough in the south of Berkshire, at 
a long, low, ivy-clad house called the Chancery, that had 
stupendous pretensions to the picturesque and the medie- 
val; and, what was of much more consequence to us, a 
capital little trout stream at the bottom of its grounds. 
Here he dwelt with a fat old housekeeper, a very good 
cook, a quasi-juvenile niece — who went in for the kitten 
line, and did it very badly, too — and four, or, when times 
were good, six hot-brained, wild-spirited, incipient men, 
worse to keep in order than a team of unbroke thorough- 
breds. No great deal of authority, however, did our Doc- 
tor — in familiar parlance, “ Old Joey ” — attempt to exercise. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


1 


We had prayers at eight, which he read in a style of inton- 
ing peculiar to himself, more soporific in ts effects than a 
scientific lecture or an Exeter Hall meeting, and dinner at 
six, a very good dinner, too, over which the fair Arabella 
presided, got up en grande tenue, and between those hours 
we amused ourselves pretty well as we chose, with cricket, 
and smoking, jack and trout, boating and swimming, rides 
on hacks such as job-masters let out to young fellows with 
long purses, and desperate flirtations with all the shop- 
girls in Frestonhills. We did do an amount of Greek and 
Euclid, of course, as otherwise the 300Z. might have been 
jeopardized, but the Doctor was generally dreaming over 
his possible chance of the Bampton lectureship, or his next 
report for the Geological Society, and was as glad to give 
us our cong^ as we were to take it. 

It was a mild September evening, I remember, when I 
first went to the Chancery. I had been a little down in 
the mouth at leaving home just in the best of the shooting 
season, and at saying good-by to my genial-hearted gov- 
ernor, and my own highly-prized bay. Ballet-girl ; but a 
brisk coach drive and a good inn dinner never yet failed to 
raise a boy’s spirits, and by the time I reached Frestonhills 
I was ready to face a much more imposing individual than 
^‘Old Joey.” The Doctor received me in his library, with 
a suspicious appearance of having just tumbled out of a 
nap ; called me his “ dear young friend ’’ on the first intro- 
duction ; treated me to a text or two, ingeniously dovetailed 
with classic quotations; took me to the drawing-room for 
presentation to Arabella, who smiled graciously on me for 
the sake of the pines, and melons, and game my mother 
had sent as a propitiatory offering with her darling; and, 
finally, consigned me to the tender mercies of the senior 
pupil. That senior pupil was standing with his back to 
the fire and his elbows on the mantle-piece, smoking a short 


8 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


pipe, in the common study. I could now, long as are the 
years between, sketch his picture as he looked then. He 
was but just eighteen, but even then he had more of the 
“grand air” about him than any one else I had ever seen. 
His figure, from its developed muscle, broad chest, slight 
as his form still was, and the show of strength in his splen- 
didly moulded arm, might have passed him for much older 
but in his face was all the spirit, the eagerness, the fire ot 
early youth, the glow of ardor that has never been chilled, 
the longing of the young gladiator for the untried arena. 
His features were chiseled like statuary, and well-nigh as 
clear and pale; his mouth and nose were clear cut, proud, 
and firm; the lines of the lips exceedingly delicate and 
haughty; his eyes were long, dark, sometimes keen as a 
falcon’s, sometimes lighting up with wonderful passion, 
sometimes laughing with a winning, mischievous archness 
if any witticism or satire crossed his mind ; his brow was 
wide, high, and powerful; his head grandly set upon his 
throat . he looked altogether, as I told him some time 
afterward, very like a thorough- bred, high-mettled, yet 
sweet-tempered racer, who was longing to run in a faster 
race, and who would never allow, if he died to resist it, 
cu'-b, or whip, or snaffle vSuch was the senior pupil, Gran- 
ville de Yigne, when I saw him first in the full glow of his 
eager, cloudless, fearless youth. He was alone, and took 
his pipe out of his lips without altering his position. 

“Well, young one, what’s your name?” 

“ Chevasney.” 

“Not a bad one. A Chevasney of Longholme?” 

“Yes. John Chevasney’s son.” 

“So you are come to be fleeced by Old Joey? Deuced 
pity! Are you good for anything?” 

“Only for grilling a devil, and riding cross country ’’ 

He threw back his head, and laughed a cle.ar ringing 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


9 


ttagh, and gave me his hand, cordially and frankly, for all 
lis hauteur and his seniority. 

“You’ll do. Sit down, innocent. I am Granville de 
Vigne. You know us, of course. Your father rode with 
our hounds last January, and I dined at Assheton Smith’s 
with him after the run, I remember. Very game old gen- 
tleman he seemed. I should have thought him too sensi- 
ble to have sent you down here. You’d have been much 
better at Eton or Rugby; there is nothing like a public 
Bcliool for taking the nonsense out of people. I liked 
Eton, at the least; but if you know how to hold your own 
and have your own way, you can make yourself comfort- 
able anywhere. The other fellows are out, gone to a 
flower-show, I think; I never attend such things myself, 
they’re too slow. There is only one of the boys worth cul- 
tivating, and he’s a very little chap, only thirteen, but he’s 
a jolly little monkey; we call him Curly, from his dandy 
gold locks. His father’s a peer” — and De Vigne laughed 
again — “one of the fresh creation: may Heaven preserve 
us from it I This Frestonhills is a detestable place ; you’ll 
be glad enough to get out of it. If it weren’t for sport, I 
should have cut it long ago, but with a hunter and a rod 
a man can never be dull. Are you a good shot, seat, and 
oar, little one ?” 

Those were De Vigne’s first words to me, and I an- 
swered them, honored and delighted with his notice, for I 
had heard many tales of him, living in the next county; 
how, at seven years old, he had ridden unnoticed to the 
finish with Assheton Smith’s hounds; how, three years 
later, he had mounted a mare none of the grooms dare 
touch, and, breaking his shoulder-bone in the attempt to 
tame her, had shut his teeth like a little Spartan, that he 
might not cry out during the setting ; how, when he saw 
his Newfoundland drowning in the mere, be had plunged 


10 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


In after his beloved dog, and only been rescued just as 
both were sinking, the boy’s arms round the animal’s neck; 
and many more like tales of him, which showed him a true 
scion of his spirited, self-willed, noble-hearted race, and 
furnished food for gossip at dull dinners, three counties 
taking an interest in Granville de Yigne, of the manor of 
Vigne, heir-prospective to forty thousand a year. 

I did know his family — the royal-sounding “Us.” I 
knew them by reputation for one of the proudest houses, 
with one of the strongest wills of their own, and one of the 
purest chains of male descent that ever English family 
possessed. They had been the seigneurs at Vigne ever 
since tradition could tell; their legends were among the 
country lore, and their names in the old cradle songs of 
rough chivalry and vague romance, handed down among 
the peasantry from generation to generation. Many cor- 
onets had lain at their feet, but they had courteously de- 
clined them ; to say the truth, they held the strawberry- 
leaves in supreme contempt, and looked down not unjustly 
on many of the roturiers of the peerage. 

De Vigne’s father, a Colonel ‘of Dragoons, had fallen 
fighting in India when his son was six years old ; and the 
boy had been brought up by his mother, a woman as wise 
as she was gentle, who gave him the love on which he 
would one day be glad to rest, but sent him among men, 
to make him worthy of his line. How this high-spirited 
representative of a haughty house was living down in the 
dull seclusion of Frestonhills was owing, to a circumstance 
very characteristic of De Vigne. At twelve years old his 
mother had sent him to Eton, a match in pluck and muscle 
and talent for boys five years his senior. There he helped 
to fight the Lords’ men, pounded bargees with a skill 
worthy of the belt, made himself captain of the boats, en* 
joyed all the popularity and detestation that the boy witn 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


11 


the cleverest head, the strongest arm, the most resolute 
will, and the most generous temper among his confreres is 
certain to gain ; and from thence, when he was seventeen, 
got himself expelled. 

His dame chanced to have a niece — a niece, tradition 
says, with the loveliest complexion and the most ravissant 
auburn hair in the world, and with whom, when she visited 
her aunt, all Oppidans and Tugs W'ho saw the beatific 
vision became straightway enamored. Whether De Yigne 
was in love with her, I can’t say ; he always averred not, 
but I doubt the truth of his statement, he being at all 
times inflammable on such points ; at any rate, he made 
her in love with him, being already rather skilled in that 
line of conquest, and all, I dare say, went merry as a mar- 
riage-bell, till the dame found out the afiair, was scandal- 
ized and horrified, and confiding the affair to the tutor, 
made no end of a row in Eton. She would have pulled all 
the college about De Vigne’s ears if he had not performed 
that operation for himself. The tutor, having had a tender 
leaning to the auburn hair on his own account, was furious; 
and coming in contact with De Vigne and mademoiselle 
strolling along by the river-side, took occasion to tell them 
his mind. Now opposition, much less lecturing, De Vigne 
in all his life never could or would brook, and he and his 
tutor coming to hot words, as men are apt when they 
quarrel about a woman, De Yigne, seizing his master in 
his strong arms, gave him such a ducking for his impu- 
dence as Eton master never had before or since. De 
Vigne, of course, was expelled for his double crime ; and 
to please his mother, as nothing would make him hear of 
three years of college life, he consented to live six months 
in the semi-academic solitude of Frestonhills, while his 
name was entered at the Horse Guards for a commission 
in the cavalry. So at the Chancery he domiciled himself, 


12 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


more as a, guest than a pupil, for the Doctor was a trifle 
afraid of his keen eyes and quick wit ; his pupil knew 
twenty times more of modern literature and valuable avail- 
able information than himself, and fifty times more of the 
world and its ways; but the Doctor, like all people, be 
their tendencies ever so heavenward, had a certain respect 
for forty thousand a year. De Yigiie kept two hunters 
and a pack in Frestonhills. He smoked Cavendish under 
the Doctor’s own windows; he read De Kock and Le Brut 
in the drawing-room before the Doctor’s very eyes, (and did 
not Miss Arabella read them too, upon the sly, though she 
blushed if you mentioned poor “Don Juan 1”) he absented 
himself when he chose, and went to shoot and hunt and 
fish with some men he knew in the county; he had his own 
way, in fact, as he had been accustomed to have it all his 
life. But it was not an obstinate or a disagreeable “own 
way true, he turned restive at the least attempt at coer- 
cion, but he was gentle enough to a coax, and though he 
could work up into very fiery passion, he was, generally 
speaking, sweet tempered enough, and had almost always 
a kind word, or a generous thought, or a laughing jest, for 
us less favored young ones. 

I had a sort of boyish devoted loyalty to him then, and 
he deserved it from me. Many a scrape did a word or two 
from him get me out of with the Doctor; many a time did 
he ^end,me into the seventh heaven by the loan of his mag- 
nificent four-year old; more than once did fivers come from 
his hand when I was deep in debt for a boy’s fancies, or 
had been cheated through thick and thin at the billiard- 
table in the Ten Bells, when De Vigne paid my debts, re- 
freshed himself by kicking the two sharpers out of the 
apartment, and threatened to shoot me if I offered him 
the money back again. A warm-hearted reverence I had 
for him in those pleasant boyish days, and always have 


GRA_NVILLE DE VIGNE. 


IS 

aad, God bless him I But fond as I was of him, I little fore- 
saw how often in the life to come we two should be together 
in revelry and in danger, in thoughtless pleasures and dark 
sorrows, in the whirl of fast life and the din and dash of 
the battle-field, and the bitter struggle of mortal agony, 
when I first saw the senior pupil smoking in the study of 
the old Chancery at Frestonhills. 


II. 


*‘THE heart is a free and a FETTERLESS THING.” 

One sunny summer’s afternoon, while Old Joey dozed 
over his “ Treatise on the Wise Tooth of the Fossil Human- 
bosh Ichthyosaurus,” and Arabella watered her geraniums 
and looked interesting in a white hat with very blue rib- 
bons, De Yigne, with his fishing-rod in his hand, looked 
into the study, and told Curly and me, who were vainly 
and wretchedly puzzling our brains over Terence, that he 
was going after jack, and we might go with him if we 
chose. Curly and I, in our adoration of our senior pupil, 
would have gone after him to martyrdom, I verily believe, 
with the greatest glorification, and we sent Terence to the 
dogs, (literally, for we shied him at Arabella’s wheezing 
King Charles,) rushed in rapture for our rods and baskets, 
and went down with De Yigne to the banks of the Kennet. 
De Yigne had an especial tenderness to old Izaak’s gentle 
art ; it was the only thing over which he displayed any pa- 
tience, and even in this he might have caught still more 
perch if he had not twitched his line so often in anger at 
the slow-going fish, and swore against them, for not biting, 

2 


u 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


roundly enough to terrify them out of all such intentions, 
If they had possessed any. 

How pleasant it was beside Pope’s ^ 

Kennet swift, for silver eels renowned, 

rushing on its silvery course through the sunny meadow 
lands of Berkshire, lingering on its way beneath the 
checkered shadows of the interlacing branches of the oaks 
and elms that rival in their majesty of foliage their great 
neighbors the beech-woods of Bucks, dashing swiftly, with 
busyjoyous song, under the rough-hewn arch of some pic- 
turesque rustic bridge, flowing clear and cool in the sum- 
mer sun through the fragrant woodlands and moss-grown 
orchards, the stately forest trees of parks and pastures, the 
nestling villages and quiet country towns, and hawthorn 
hedges dropping their white buds into its changeful gleam- 
ing waves. How pleasant it was fishing for jack among 
our Kennet meadows, lying under the pale willows and the 
dark wayfaring tree with its white starry blossoms, while 
the cattle came down to drink up to their hocks in the 
flags and lilies and snowflakes fringing the river’s edge; 
and the air came fresh and fragrant over the swathes of 
new-mown grass and the crimson buds of the little dog- 
roses. Half its beauty was lost upon us, with our boyish 
density to all appeals made to our less material senses, 
except upon He Yigne, who had even then a warm lover- 
like quickness of perception to all fair things nature could 
show him, which has never left him, though his life has 
chiefly passed in the excitement of cities and camps. Often 
he stopped to have a glance across the country as he stood 
trolling, spinning the line with much more outlay of strength 
and vehemence than was needed, landing every now and then 
a ten-pound pike, with a violent anathema upon it for hav- 
ing dared to dispute his will so long; while little Curly 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


15 


Jazily whipped the water, stretched full length on a fragrant 
bed of wild thyme. What a pretty child he was, too, poor 
little chap ! more like one of the Pompadour’s pages, or a 
boy-hero of the Trouvhres, with his white skin and his 
violet eyes, than an every-day slang-talking, lark-loving 
English lad. 

“By George! what a handsome girl,” said Be Yigne, 
taking off his cap and standing at ease for a minute, after 
landing a great jack that had given him no little trouble 
to capture it. “I’m not fond of dark women generally, 
but ’pon my life she is splendid. What a contour 1 What 
a figure I Do for the queen of the gipsies, eh ? Why the 
deuce isn’t she this side of the river?” 

The object of his admiration was on the opposite bank, 
strolling along by herself, with a certain dignity of air and 
stateliness of step which would not have ill-become a 
duchess, though her station in life was probably a dress- 
maker’s apprentice, or a small shopkeeper’s daughter, at 
the very highest. She was as handsome as one of those 
brunette peasant beauties in the plains of La Camargue, 
with a clear dark skin that had a rich carnation glow on 
the cheeks, large black eyes, perfect in shape and color, 
if not in expression, a pure aquiline profile, and a form 
Guch as would develop with years — for she was now prob- 
ably not more than sixteen or seventeen — into full Juno- 
esque magnificence. 

“By Jove! she is very handsome; and she knows it, 
too,” began De Yigne again. “I have never seen her 
about here before. I’ll go across and talk to her.” 

Go he assuredly would have done, for female beauty was 
De Yigne’s weakness, but at that minute a short, square, 
choleric-looking keeper came out of the wood at our back, 
and went up to little Curly. 

“Hallo, you there — you young swell; don’t you know 
you are trespassing ?” 


16 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“No, I don’t,” answered Curly, in his pretty soft voice. 

“ Don’t you know you’re on Mr. Tressillian’s ground ?” 
Bang out the keeper. 

“Am I ? Well, give my love to him, and say I shall be 
very happy to give him the pleasure of my company at 
dinner to-night,” rejoined Curly, imperturbably. 

“You imperent young dog — will you march off this 
»ere minute I” roared the bellicose guardian of Mr. Tres- 
sillian’s right of fishing. 

“ Wouldn’t you like to see me ?” laughed Curly, flinging 
his march-brown into the stream. 

“Curse you, if you don’t, I’ll come and take your rod 
away, you little devil,” sang out the keeper. 

“ Will you, really? That’ll be too obliging, you look so 
sweet and amiable as it is,” said Curly, with a provoking 
smile on his pretty little face. 

“Yes, I will; and take you up to the house and get you 
a month at the mill for trespass, you abominable little 
swell !” vowed his adversary, laying his great fist on Curly’s 
rod ; but the little chap sprang to his feet and struck his 
foe a vigorous blow with his childish white hand, which fell 
on the keeper’s brawny form much as a fly’s kick at the 
Apollo Belvidere. The man seized him round the waist, 
but Curly struck out right and left, and kicked, and strug- 
gled with such hearty good will, that the keeper let him 
go, bat, keeping his hand on the boy’s collar, was about to 
drag him up to the lord of the manor, Boughton TreS’ 
sillian, whose house stood about a mile distant. But at 
the sound of the scuffle, De Vigne, intent on watching his 
beauty across the Kennet, swung round, and rushed up to 
Curly’s rescue, the child being rather a pet of his, and De 
Vigne never seeing a fight between might and right with- 
out striking in with a blow for the weak one. 

“Take your hands off that young gentleman.” he said 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


n 


with all his hauteur and impatience. “Take your hands 
off, do you hear? or I will give you in charge for assault.^’ 

“Will yer, Master Stilts,” growled the keeper, purple 
with dire wrath. “I’ll give you in charge, you mean. 
You’re poaching — ay, poaching, for all yer grand airs; 
and I’ll be hanged if I don’t take you and the little uns, 
all of yer, up to the house, and see if a committal don’t 
take the rise out of you, my game cocks.” 

Wherewith the keeper, whom anger must have totally 
blinded ere he attempted such an indignity with our senior 
pupil, whose manorial rights stretched over woods and 
waters twenty times the extent of Boughton Tressillian’s, 
let go his hold upon Curly, and turned upon De Yigne, to 
collar him instead. 

De Vigne’s eyes flashed, and the blood mounted over 
his temples as he straightened his left arm and received 
him with a plant in the middle of his chest, with a dexter- 
ity that would have done no discredit to Tom Sayers. 
Down went the man under the scientific blow, only to pick 
himself up again and charge at De Vigne with all the vio- 
lence of fury, which generally, in such attacks, defeats its 
own ends, and makes a man strike wildly and at random. 
The senior pupil had not had mills at Eton, and rounds 
with bargees at Little Surley, without becoming a boxer, 
such as would have delighted Lord William Lennox. He 
threw himself into a scientific attitude, and, contenting 
himself with the defensive for the first couple of rounds, 
without being touched himself, caught the keeper on the 
left temple, with a force that sent that individual down like 
a felled ox. There he lay, like a log, on the thyme and 
ground ivy and woodbine, till I fancy De Vigne had cer- 
tain uncomfortable suspicions that he might have killed 
him So he picked him up, gave him a good shake, and, 

2* b 


18 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


finding him all right, except decidedly sulky, frightfully 
vengeful, and full of most unrighteous oaths, though not 
apparently willing to encounter such another round, De 
Vigne pushed him on before him, and took him up to Mr. 
Tressillian’s to keep his word, and give him in charge. 

Weive Hurst, Boughton Tressillian’s manor-house, was 
a fine, rambling, antique old place, with castellated walls 
and deep mullioned windows, its fa9ade looking all the 
grayer and the older in contrast to the green lawn, with 
its graceful larches, silvery fountains, and brilliantly-filled 
flower-beds that stretched in front of it. The powdered 
servant that opened the door looked not a little startled at 
our unusual style of morning visit, but gave way, as every- 
body always did, before De Yigne, and showed us into the 
/ibrary, where Mr. Tressillian sat — a stately, kindly, silver- 
haired old gentleman. De Yigne sank into the easy-chair, 
wheeled for him, and opened the proceedings with that 
urbane courtesy and winning softness which, when joined 
to his aristocratic hauteur of appearance, won him the 
suffrages of all who saw him. He told his tale frankly and 
briefly; demonstrated, as clearly as if he had been a 
lawyer, our right to fish on the highway-side of the river, 
(an often disputed point for anglers,) and the consequent 
illegality of the keeper’s assault; and Boughton Tressil- 
lian, open to conviction, though he was a county magnate 
and a magistrate, admitted that he had no right over that 
part of the Kennet, agreed with De Yigne that his keeper 
was in the wrong, promised to give the man a good lec- 
ture, and apologized to his visitor for the interference and 
the affront. 

“ If you will stay and dine with me, Mr. De Yigne, and 
your young friends also, it will give me very great pleas- 
ure,” said the cordial and courteous old man. 

“I thank you. We should have been most happy,” re- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


19 


turned our senior pupil; “but as it is, I am afraid we shall 
be late for Dr. Primrose.” 

“For Dr. Primrose!” exclaimed Tressillian, involun- 
tarily. “You are not ” 

“I am a pupil at the Chancery,” laughed De Yigne. 

Our host actually started ; De Yigne certainly did look 
very little like a pupil of any man’s, but he smiled in 
return. 

“Indeed I Then I hope you will often give me the 
pleasure of your society. There is a billiard-table in wet 
weather, and good fishing and rabbit-shooting, faute de 
mieux, in the fine. It will be a great kindness, I assure 
you, to come and enliven us at Weive Hurst a little.” 

“ The kindness will be to us,” returned De Yigne, cor- 
dially. “Good day to you, Mr. Tressillian; accept my 
best thanks for your ” 

A shower of roses, lilies, and laburnums, pelted at him 
with a merry ringing laugh, stopped his valedictory ha- 
rangue. The culprit was a little girl of three years old, 
standing just outside the low windows of the library — a 
pretty child, with golden hair waving to her waist, and no 
end of mischief in her dark blue eyes. Unlike most chil- 
dren, she was not at all frightened at her own misdemean- 
ors, but stood her ground, till Boughton Tressillian stretched 
out his arm to catch her. Then she turned round and took 
wing as rapidly as a bird oflf a bough, with her gold hair 
streaming behind her, and her clear childish laughter ring- 
ing on the summer air. But De Yigne gave chase to the 
only child in his life he ever deigned to notice, justly think- 
ing them, by-the-by, great nuisances; of course his steps 
brought him in a second up with her, let her run as fast as 
sne might, and he led her prisoner to the library, holding 
the wide blue sash by which he had caught her. 

“Here is my second captive, Mr. Tressillian — what shall 
we do to her ?” 


80 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Boughton Tressillian smiled. 

“Alma, how could you be so naughty? Tell this gen. 
tleman you are a spoilt child, and ask him to forgive you.” 

She looked up under her long black lashes half shyly, 
half wickedly. 

“Signor, perdonatemi I” she said, with a mischievous 
laugh, in broken Italian, though how a little Berkshire 
girl came to talk Neapolitan instead of English I could 
not then imagine. 

“Alma, you are very naughty to-day,” said Tressillian, 
half impatiently. “Why do you not speak English ? Ask 
his forgiveness properly.” 

“I will pardon her without it,” laughed De Yigne. 
“ There, Alma, will you not love me now ?” 

She pushed her sunny hair off her eyes and looked at 
him — a strangely earnest and wistful look, too, for so young 
a child. I suppose she was pleased with the survey, for 
she put her little fingers voluntarily into his hand. “ Si, 
Alma vi amal” she answered him with joyous vivacity, 
pressing upon him with eager generosity some geraniums 
the head gardener had given her, and which but a moment 
ago she had fastened into her little white dress with ex- 
treme admiration and triumph. 

“Bravo!” said Curly, as, five minutes afterward, we 
passed out from the great hall door. “You are a brick, 
De Vigne, and no mistake. How splendidly you pitched 
into that rascally keeper! Wasn’t it no end of a go?” 

De Vigne laughed. 

“It was a good bit of fun. Always stand up for your 
rights, my boy; if you don’t, who will for you? I never 
was done yet in my life, and never intend to be.” 

With whicli wise resolution the senior pupil struek a 
fusee and lit his pipe, and we got home just in time to 
dress, and for De Vigne to hand Arabella in to dinner. 


GRANVIXLE DE 'VT^GNE. 


2: 


who paid him at all times desperate court, hoping, doubt- 
less, to make such an impression on him with her long 
ringlets and bravura songs as might trap him in his early 
youth into such “serious’^ action as would make her mis- 
tress of Vigne and the long rent-roll That Granville saw 
no more of her than he could help in common courtesy, 
and paid her not so much attention as he did to her King 
Charles, was no check to the young lady’s wild imaginings. 
At eight-and-twenty, women grown desperate don’t stick 
to probabilities, but fly their hawks at any or a-l all game, 
so that “perad venture they may catch one.” 

Weive Hurst proved a great gain to us. Soughton 
Tressillian was as good as his word, and w(* /fere at all 
times cordially welcomed there. Even us younger ones 
he liked to have, when the Doctor gave us permission, to 
shoot and fish and ride about his grounds, and lunch with 
him afterward on such Strasbourg pMes and splendid wines 
as seldom fall even to “private pupils,” much less to the 
lot of ordinary schoolboys, and was bever happier than 
when De Yigne, who had only nominal leave to ask, went 
over there to dine with him. He grew extremely fond of 
our senior pupil, who, haughty as he could be at tiniies, 
and impatient as he was at any of Old Joey’s weak attempts 
at coercion, had a very winning reverential way with old 
people — played billiards, heard his tales of the times 
when he was a lion with the men of the gay Regency, and 
broke in his new colts for him, till he fairly won his way 
into Boughton Tressillian’s heart. It was for De Vigne 
that the butler was always bid to bring the Steinberg and 
the 1815 port*, De Yigne to whom he gave a mare worth 
five hundred sovereigns, the most beautiful piece of horse- 
flesh ever mounted; De Yigne who might have knocked 
down every head of game in the preserves if he had chosen ; 
De Yigne to whom little Alma Tressillian, the old man’s 


^2 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


only grandchild, and the future heiress, of course, of Weive 
Uurst and all its appanages, presented the darling of her 
heart — a donkey, minus head or tail or panniers. 

But De Yigne did not avail himself of the sport at 
Weive Hurst so much as he might have done had he no 
other game in hand. His affair with Tressillian’s keeper 
had prevented his going to make impromptu acquaintance 
with the handsome girl across the Kennet, but she had 
not slipped from his mind, and had made suflBcient im- 
pression upon him to induce him to try the next day to 
see her again in Frestonhills, and find out who she was 
and w'here she lived, two questions he soon settled by some 
means or other greatly to his own satisfaction. The girPs 
name was Lucy Davis ; whence she came nobody knew or 
perhaps inquired ; but now she was one of the hands at a 
milliner’s in Frestonhills, prized by her employers, young 
as she was, for her extreme talent and skill, though equally 
detested, I believe, for her tyrannous and tempestuous 
temper. The girl was handsome enough for an empress, 
and had a wonderful style in her when she was dressed in 
her Sunday silks and cashmeres, for dress was her passion, 
to be “ a lady” her ambition — an ambition that would have 
scrupled at no means to gain its end — and all her earnings 
were spent in imitating the toilettes she assisted in getting 
up to adorn the rectors’ and lawyers’ wives of Frestonhills. 
“The Davis” was handsome enough to send a much older 
man mad after her, and De Vigne, after meeting her once 
or twice in the summer evenings, taking her solitary walks 
in the deep shady lanes of our green picturesque Berk- 
shire, introduced himself to her, was very graciously re- 
ceived, accompanied her in her strolls, and — fell in love 
with her, as De Vigne, and, indeed, all his passionate and 
headstrong race before him, had a knack of doing with 
every handsome woman who came near him. We all of us 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


23 


adored tLe stately, black-eyed, black-browed Lucy Davis, 
but she never deigned any notice of our boyish worship; 
and when De Vigne came into the field, we gave up all 
hope, and fled the scene in desperation. The Doctor, of 
course, knew nothing of the affair, though almost every 
one else in Frestonhills did, especially the young bankers 
and solicitors and grammar-school assistant-masters, who 
swore at that “cursed fellow at the Chancery” for monopo- 
lizing the splendid young milliner — especially as the 
“cursed fellow” treated them considerably de haut en bas. 
De Vigne was really in love, for the time being, with Lucy 
Davis; one of those hot, vehement, short-lived attach- 
ments natural to his age and character, based on eye-love 
alone, for the girl had nothing else lovable about her, and 
had one of the nastiest tempers possible, which she did not 
always spare even to him, and which, when the first glamour 
had a little cooled, made De Vigne rather glad than other- 
wise that his departure from Frestonhills was drawing near 
Bome two months after he had seen her across the Kennet, 
and would give him an opportunity to break with her he 
otherwise might have found it difficult to make. 

How we envied him when the letter on “Her Majesty’s 
Service ” came which announced him as gazetted to the — 
P. W. 0. Hussars. That same evening (De Vigne was 
about to leave the following noon, to stay a week or two 
with his mother, whom he loved tenderly and fervently) 
little Curly and I were strolling after dinner, having been 
sent with a message to a neighboring rector from the Doc- 
tor, riding by turns on Miss Arabella’s white pony, talking 
over the coming holidays, “vacation,” as Old Joey called 
them, and of the long, sunny future that stretched before 
ns in dim golden haze, so near and yet so far from our 
young, longing eyes. I recollect how Curly (bless the boy 1) 
sketched out his life, what a long, joyous life it was to be, 


24 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


now full ne was of trust and eagerness and glad, childish faith 
in the years that were to come I Poor little Curly 1 

Halloa!” he began at last, interrupting himself in his 
discourse, as De Yigne’s terrier jumped up upon us. 
Here’s Punch ! Where’s your Master, eh boy ? There he 
is, by Jove I Arthur, over the hedge yonder talking to 
the Davis. What prime fun I I wish I dared to chaff 
him.” 

Curly, being on the pony’s back, could have a view over 
the hedge, which was denied to me ; and when 1 climbed up 
the bank, and swung myself to a similar eminence by means 
of an elm-bough, I saw at some little distance, under an 
oak-tree, in a meadow through whose center the Kennet 
flowed — a favorite place with him to bring a book, and lie 
smoking in the woody shade — De Yigne and Lucy Davis in 
very earnest conversation, or rather, it seemed to me, alter- 
cation. De Yigne was switching the long meadow grass 
impatiently with his cane, his cap was drawn down over his 
forehead, and even at that distance I thought he looked 
pale and annoyed. The girl Davis stood before him, seem- 
ingly in one of those violent furies that reputation attrib- 
uted to her, and by turns adjuring, abusing, and threaten- 
ing him. 

Curly and I stayed some minutes looking at them, for 
the scene piqued our interest, making us think of Eughne 
Sue and Dumas, and all the love scenes we had devoured 
when the Doctor supposed us plodding at the Pons Asi- 
norum or the De Officiis; but we could make nothing out 
of it, except that De Yigne and the Davis were quarrel- 
ing; and an intuitive perception that the senior pupil would 
not admire any espionage made me descend from my elm 
branch, and Curly start off the pony homeward. 

That night De Yigne was silent and gloomy in the draw- 
ing-room with Arabella and the Doctor; gave us young 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


25 


ones but a brief “Good night,” and shut his bedroom door 
with a clang; but the next morning he seemed all right 
again, as he breakfastC'i for the last time in the old Chan« 
eery. 

“What a lucky fellow you are, De yigne,”said Curly, as 
he stood in the hall, waiting for the fly to take him to the 
station. 

He laughed. 

“Oh, I don’t know I We shall see if we all say so this 
time twenty years. If I could foresee the future, I wouldn’t. 
I love the glorious uncertainty; it is the only sauce pi- 
quante one has, and I can’t say I fear fate very much.” 

How full of fearlessness and pride, spirit and eagerness, 
and high-mettled courage he looked as he spoke. And 
well he might at eighteen I Master, when he came of age, 
of a splendid fortune, his own guide, his own arbiter, able 
and certain to see life in all its most deliciously attractive 
forms, with strength of body, talents of a very high order, 
wit such as would make him in older years as brilliant a 
conversationalist as Talleyrand, a character fearless, gen- 
erous, and noble, a face and a form sure to win his way 
among women ; manners, muscle, and brain certain to make 
him courted and popular among men ; truly, it seemed that 
he, if any one, might trust to the sauce piquante of uncer- 
tain fate I 

There he went oflT by the express with his portmanteaus, 
lettered, as we enviously read, “ Granville de Yigne, P. W. 
O. Hussars;” off with a Punch and a Havanna to amuse 
him on the way — to much more than Exeter Barracks — on 
the way to Manhood; to all its chances and its changes, 
its wild revels and its dark regrets, its sparkling champagne 
cup, and its bitter aconite lying at the dregs. 

Off he went, and we, left behind in the dull solitude of 
academic Frestonhills, so solitary without him, watched the 

3 


VOL. I. 


26 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Bcnoke curling from the engine as it disappeared round the 
bend of a cutting, and wondered in vague schoolboy fashion 
what sort of thing De Vigne would make of Life. 


III. 

SOUTHERLY WIND AND A CLOUDY SKY PROCLAIM IT A 
HUNTING MORNING.” 

“Confound it, I can’t cram, and I won’t cram, so there’s 
an end of it I” sang out a Cantab one fine October morning, 
flinging Plato’s Republic to the far end of the room, where 
it knocked down a grind-cup, smashed a punch-bowl, and 
cracked the glass that glazed the charms of the last pet of 
the ballet. 

. The sun streamed through the oriel windows of my rooms 
in dear old Trinity. The roaring fire crackled, blazed, and 
chatted away to a slate-colored Skye that lay full length 
before it. The table was spread with coffee, audit, devils, 
omelets, hare-pies, and all the other edibles of the buttery 
The sunshine within shone on pipes and pictures, tobacco- 
boxes and little bronzes, books, cards, cigar-cases, statuettes, 
portraits of Derby winners, and likenesses of modern Helens 
i — all in confusion, tumbled pell-mell together among sofas 
and easy-chairs, rifles, cricket-bats, and skates. The sun- 
shine without shone on the backs, so fair in spring, and 
still boasting a certain attractiveness, with their fresh turf, 
and graceful bridges, and outriggers pulling up and down 
the cold classic waters of the Cam, more celebrated, but 
far less clear and lovely, I must say, than our old, dancing 
rapid, joyous Kennet. 

Everything looked essentially jolly, and jolly did I and 


GRANVILLE I)E VIGNE. 


my two companions feel smoking before a splendid fire in 
the easiest of attitudes and couches, a very trifle seedy 
from a prolonged wine the night previous. 

One of them was a handsome young fellow of twenty or 
so, a great deal too handsome for the peace of the masters’ 
daughters, and of the fair patissieres and fleuristes of Petty 
Cury and King’s Parade, known on the rolls as Percy 
Brandling, second son of Lord Cashingcheque, (a Man- 
chester man, who, having padded himself well with cotton, 
was rewarded for his industry, or his ingots, by the dis- 
cerning nation with a spick and span new coronet,) alias 
“Curly,” the self-same, save some additional feet of height 
and some fondly-cherished whiskers, as our little Curly of 
Prestonhills. The other was a man of five-and-twenty, his 
figure having gained in muscle and power without losing 
one atom in symmetry, showing that his nerve and strength 
would tell pulling up stream, or in a fast twenty minutes 
across country, or, if occasion turned up, in that “noble 
art of self-defense,” now growing as popular in England as 
in days of yore at Elis, where, by the way, manly games 
found no better defender there than ours do here in our 
great statesman, long, I hope, to be our Premier, with his 
wonderful brain and his vernal heart. His features, deli- 
cately chiseled, had the stamp of a life full of wild pleasures 
and strong excitements, but his dark eyes had the fire and 
the glow of a man whose spirit is unchilled, whose pas- 
sions have all the vehemence of youth, and to whom exist- 
ence still offers all that makes existence attractive and 
worth preserving. As he lay back, swinging himself in a 
rocking-chair, looking into the Times and smoking his 
favorite Cavendish, the grand air, noticeable even in his 
boyhood, still more marked now, of course, that his years 
had been passed in some of the best society of Europe, the 
clear intellect on his brow and the keen wit on his lips yet 


28 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


more distinguished from culture and contact with other 
minds, anybody would have known him in an instant, 
despite the lapse of time, to be Granville De Yigne, the 
senior pupil of the bygone days at the old Chancery. 

“Cram?” he said, looking up as Curly spoke. “Why 
should you? What’s the good of it? Youth is made for 
something warmer than academic routine, and knowledge 
of the world will stand a man in better stead than the 
quarrels of commentators and the dry demonstrations of 
mathematicians.” 

“Of course. Not a doubt about it,” said Curly, stretch- 
ing himself. “ I find soda-water and brandy the best guano 
for the cultivation of my intellect, I can tell you.” 

“Do you think it will get you a double first?” 

“Heaven forefend !” cried Curly, with extreme piety. 
“I’ve no ambition for lawn sleeves, though they do bring 
with them as neat a little income as any vessel of grace 
who lives on clover and forswears the pomps and vanities 
of this wicked world can possibly desire.” 

“No,” laughed De Vigne; you’ll live in clover, my 
^boy, trust you for that. But you won’t pretend that you 
^only take it because you’re “ called ” to it, and that you 
would infinitely prefer, if left to yourself, a hovel and dry 
bread. Don’t cram, Curly; your great saps are like the 
geese they fatten for our p4tes de foie gras ; they overfeed 
one part of the system till all the rest is weak, diseased, 
and worthless. But the geese have the best of it, for their 
livers do make something worth eating, while the reading- 
man’s brains are rarely productive of anything worth 
writing. A man learns far more knocking about the world, 
keeping his eyes and ears open, making himself au courant 
with all the topics of the day, up to all the intellectual and 
philosophical discussions of his own time, than buried in 
the dusty tomes of a dead age, shut out from all actual and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


29 


practical life, a mere receptacle for the spiritless skeletons 
of abstruse studies, as the Pyramids for the tenautlesa 
coffin of a dead Cheops,” 

“Ahl” re-echoed Curly, with an envious sigh of assent, 
wonder whose knowledge is worth the most, my old 
coach, Bosanquet’s, a living miracle of classic research, but 
who couldn’t, to save his life, tell you who was Premier, 
translate ‘Comment vous portez-vous ?’ or know a Cres- 
wick from a Rubens, or yours, who can tell one every- 
thing that’s going, know English and foreign politics by 
heart, have read everything that’s readable in modern 
tongues, and have everything at your fingers’ ends that one 
can want to hear about, from the last clause in the budget 
to the best make in rifles ?” 

De Vigne laughed. “Well, a man can’t tumble about 
in the world, if he has any brains at all, without learning 
something; but, my dear fellow, that’s all ‘superficial,’ 
they’ll tell you ; and it is atrociously bad taste to study 
leading articles instead of Greek unities. ‘ Chacun a son 
gout,’ you know. That young fellow above your head is a 
mild spectacled youth, Arthur says, who gives scientific 
teas where you give roistering wines, wins Craven scholar- 
ships where you get gated, and falls in love with the fair - 
structure of the (Edipus Tyrannus where you go mad about 
the unfortunately more perishable form of that pretty little 
girl at the cigar-shop over the way. You think him a 
muff’, and he, I day say, looks on you as an ame damnee, 
both in the French and English sense of the words. You 
both fill up niches in your own little world ; you needn’t 
jostle one another. If all horses ran for one cup only, the 
turf would soon come to grief. Why ain’t you like me? 

I go on my own way, and never trouble my head about ♦ 
other people’s vagaries.” 

‘.‘Why am 1 not like you?” repeated Curly, with a pro- 
3 * 


30 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


longed whistle “ Why isn’t water as good as rum punch, 
or my bedmaker as pretty as little Rosalie ? Don’t I just 
wish I were you, instead of a beggarly younger son, tied 
by the leg in Granta, bothered with chapel, and all sorts of 
horrors, and rusticated if I try to see the smallest atom of 
life. By George ! De Vigne, what a jolly time you must 
have had of it since you left Old Joey’s !” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” said De Yigne, looking into the 
fire with a smile. “I’ve gone the pace, I dare say, as fast 
as most men, and there are few things I have not tried; 
but I am not blase yet, thank Heaven I When other things 
begin to bore me I turn back to sport, that never palls ; 
there’s too much change and verve and excitement in it, 
the only game, by the way, which does not lose its charm 
in losing its novelty. Wine one can’t drink more than a 
certain amount of — I can’t, at the least — without getting 
tired of it; women — well, for all the poets write about the 
joys of constancy, there is no pleasure so great as change 
there, and like the Paris Bohemien, one must go from 
brunes to blondes, from hazel eyes to blue, ‘afin de varier 
les couleurs ;’ but in sport one needs no change there ; with 
a good speat in the river, or clever dogs among the tur- 
nips, or a fine fox along a cramped country, a man need 
never be dull; the ping of a bullet, the silver shine of a 
trout’s back, the wild halloo of the finish, never lose their 
pleasure; one, can’t say as much for the brightest Rhenish 
that ever cooled our throats, nor the brightest glances that 
ever lured us into folly, though Heaven forefend that I 
should ever say a word against either the Falernian or the 
Floras of our lives !” 

“You’d be a very ungrateful fellow if you did,” said I, 
“seeing that you generally monopolize the very best of 
both.” 

He laughed again. “Well, I’ve seen life — 1 loli yoa 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


31 


little fellows at Frestonhills I trusted to my sauce piquaiite» 
and I must say it has used me very well hitherto, and I 
dare say it always will as long as I keep away from the 
Jews; for, while a man has plenty of tin, all the world 
offers the choicest hors d’oeuvres and entremets for his 
dinner, till he is sick of them; though, when he has over- 
drawn at Coutts^s, and is starving for a mouthful, his friends 
wouldn’t offer him dry bread or picked bones if they knew 
it, to keep him out of the union 1 Be able to dine en prince 
at home, and you’ll be invited out every night of your life 
— be hungry au troisi^me, and you must not lick the crumbs 
from under your sworn allies’ tables, those jolly good fel- 
lows who have surfeited themselves at yours many a time 
over! Oh yes, 1 enjoy life; a man always can as long as 
he can pay for it.” 

With which axiom De Yigne rose from his rocking-chair, 
laid down his pipe, and stretched himself. 

“ It looks fine out yonder — shall we go and have a pull ? 
Our boat club (you know I am stroke of the Grand Blue 
Jersey B. C.; there are lots of Eton fellows in it) think of 
challenging your University Eight for love, good-will, and 
a gold cup. We never do anything for nothing in Eng- 
land ; if we play, we must play for money or ornaments. 
I should like to do the things for the sake of the fun, and 
the sport, and the triumph alone ; but that isn’t a general 
British feeling at all. Money is to us all that glory was 
to the Romans, and military success is to the French. 
Genius is valued by the money it makes; artists are prized 
by the price of their pictures. If the nation is grateful 
once in a hundred years, it votes a pension ; and if we want 
to have a good-humored contest, we must wait till there 
are subscriptions enough to buy a cup, or a belt, or some 
other reward to tempt us. Well, come along, Arthur, let’s 
have a puli to keep us in practice.” 


32 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


We accordingly had a pull up that time-honored stream, 
where Trinity has so often won challenge cups, and luck- 
less King’s so often got bumped, thanks to its quasi-Etonian 
idleness; where grave philosophers have watched the set- 
ting sun dying out of the sky, as the glories of their own 
youth ha\e died away unvalued, till lost forever; where 
ascetic reading men have mooned along its banks blind to 
all the loveliness of the water-lily on its waters, or the 
rose-hued clouds above it, as they took their constitutional 
and pondered their prize essay ; where thousands of brave, 
and eager, and fearless young hearts have dropped down 
under its trees in their little boats, dreaming over Don 
Juan or the Lotus-eaters, or pulled along straining every 
muscle and every nerve in the great boat race, or sauntered 
beside it in sweet midsummer eves v/ith some other fair 
face upraisedNfco theirs, long forgotten, out of mind now, 
but which then had power over them to make them oblivi- 
ous of all things, '^even of proctors and rustication. We 
pulled along with lieaYty good will, aided by an arm which, 
could we but have had it, we thought, with regretful sighs, 
to help us in the University race, must have beaten Oxford 
out-and-out. The Brocas and Little Surley could have 
told you tales of that slashing stroke ; and if, monsieur or 
madarae, you are a '‘sentimental psychologist,” and sneer 
it down as “animal,” let me tell you it is the hand that 
is strong in sport and in righteous strife that will bo 
warmer in help, and firmer in friendship, and more gen- 
erous in deed, than the puny weakling’s who cannot hold 
his own. 

“ By George !” said De Vigne, resting at last upon his 
oar — “by George I is there anything after all that gives 
one a greater zest in life tliau corporeal exertion ?” 

A sentiment, however, in which indolcid Curly defdined 
to coincide. “Give me,” said he. “a lo>- of cushioiA^s a 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE, 


S3 

hooKab, a novel, and some Seltzer, and your ‘ corporeal 
exertion ’ may go to the deuce for me 

De Vigne laughed; though I dare say, but for the liking 
he bore him, the young English Sybarite would have had 
a sharp retort, for De Vigne was not over merciful on the 
present-day assumption in beardless boys of effeminacy, nil 
admirarism and blase indifference to all things. He was 
far too frank himself for affectation, and too spirited for 
ennui ; at the present, at least, his sauce piquante had not 
lost its flavor. 

Yet he had seen life, as he had told us himself, in all its 
phases, both in the glare of the most brilliant footlights, 
and in the darkest gloom, behind its coarsely-painted 
scenes. But life had hitherto been full of dashing excite- 
ments and highly-tinted pleasures to him ; the bien-aimes 
of fortune are usually the darlings of women, though we 
know their love is so disinterested ; and no man finds the 
worse friends because he gives them first-rate wine, and 
prime Manillas, and lends them a cool hundred when they 
want it, never missing and never remembering it. Besides 
these adventitious advantages of wealth and position, De 
Vigne was a man sure to find life very pleasant, at least 
on his entrance to it; women delighted in the restless and 
vehement nature which yielded them a worship, if short- 
lived so much more passionate, than they found ordinarily 
in their lovers out of romances; and men were certain to 
like him for his candor, his high spirit, his fearless courage, 
his generous honor, and his intellect, clear, comprehensive, 
and stored with all the knowledge of the day. 

He had seen life; he iiad hunted with the Pytchley, 
stalked royals in the Highlands, flirted with maids of 
honor, given su[)pers to premieres danseuses, had dinners 
fit for princes at the Star and Garter, and petits soupers 
in cabinets particuliers at Vefour’s and Tortoni’s. He and 


.^4 GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

his yacht, when he got leave, had gone everywhere that a 
yacht could go; the Ionian Isles knew no figure-head 
better than his Aphrodite’s; it had carried him up to 
Balrnon fishing in Norway, and across the Atlantic to hunt 
buffaloes and cariboos; to Granada, to look into soft 
Spanish faces by the dim moonlight in the Alhambra; and 
to Venice, to fling bouquets upward to the balconies, and 
whisper to Venetian masks that showed him the glance 
of long almond eyes, in the riotous Carnival time. He 
had had a brief campaign in Scinde, where he was wounded 
in the hip, and tenderly nursed by a charming civil service 
widow; where his daring drew down upon him the admir- 
ing rebuke of his commanding officer, and won him his 
troop, which promotion had brought him back to Eng- 
land and enabled him to exchange into the Lancers, 

technically the Dashers, the best nom de guerre for that 
daring and brilliant corps. And now De Vigne, who had 
never lost sight of me since the Frestonhill’s days, but, on 
the contrary, often asked me to go and shoot over Vigne 
when he assembled a whole crowd of guests in that magni- 
ficent mansion, had now, having a couple of months’ leave, 
run down to Newmarket for the October Meeting, and had 
come at my entreaty to spend a week in Granta, where, I 
need not tell you, we feted him, and did him the honors of 
the place in no bad style. 

“ Crash ! crash 1 went the relentless chapel bell the next 
morning, waking us out of dreamless slumber that had en- 
dured not much more than an hour,, owing to a late night 
of it with a man at John’s over punch and vingt-et-un; 
and we had to tumble out of bed and rush into chapel, 
twisting on our coats and swearing at our destinies as we 
went. The Viewaway, the cleverest pack in the easterly 
counties, though not, I admit, up to the Durton, or Ted- 
worth, or Melton mark, met that day for the first run of 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


35 


the season at Euston Hollows, five miles from Cambridge, 
and Curly, who overcame his love of the dolce on such 
occasions, staggered into his stall, the pink dextrously 
covered with his surplice, his bright hair for once in dis- 
order, and his blue eyes most unmistakably sleepy. “ Who’d 
be a hapless undergrad? That fellow He Yigne’s dream- 
ing away in comfort, while we’re dragged out by the heels 
for a lot of confounded humbug and form,” lamented 
Curly to me, as we entered. The readers hurried the 
prayers over in that sing-song recitative in favor with col- 
lege-men, which is a cross between the drone of a gnat ana 
the whine of a Suffolk peasant ; it’s meant to be, I pre- 
sume, as indeed I think it’s called, “intoning.” We young 
fellows dozed comfortably, sitting down and getting up at the 
right times by sheer force of habit, or read Dumas or Bal- 
zac under cover of our prayer-books. The freshmen alone 
tried to look alive and attentive ; we knew it was but a 
ritual, much such an empty but time-honored one as the 
gathering of Fellows at the Signing of the Leases at 
King’s, or any other moss-grown formula of Mater, and 
attempted no such thing, and rushed out of chapel again, 
the worse instead of the better for the ill-timed devotions, 
which forced us, in our thoughtless youth, into irreverence 
and hypocrisy, a formula as absurd, as soulless, and as sad 
to see as the praying windmills of the Hindoos, at which 
those “heads of the Church,” who uphold morning chapel 
as the sole safeguard of Granta, smile in pitying derision. 

When I got back to my rooms I found breakfast wait- 
ing, and De Vigne standing on the hearth-rug tickling my 
Skye with his riding-whip, looking as gallant and as 
“game” in his scarlet hunting suit as any knight of old 
could do in hauberks and in mail, t^ven if those gentry had 
been wnat Froissart and Com mines, when^we read them 
for the first time, would fain make us think and hope. 


3C 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Audit and hare-pie had not much temptation for us that 
morning. We were soon in saddle, and off to Eustou 
Hollows ; and after a brisk gallop to cover, we found our- 
selves riding up the approach to the M. F. H.’s house, 
where the meet was to be held. The house — or rather in- 
congruous pile of Elizabethan architecture with Crystal 
Palace-like conservatories, which made it at once the idol 
and horror of the Archaeological Society — stood well on a 
rising ground, (the only rising ground, you will say, in that 
flat county,) and the master of it, who had lately married as 
pretty a girl as any man could want to see, was slightly 
known to De Yigne, and well known to us, a frank, high- 
spirited, highly-cultivated man — en un mot, an English 
gentleman, in the perfection of those meaning words. The 
meet took place in an open sweep of grassland belted with 
trees, just facing the hall, and there were gathered all the 
men of the Viewaway, mounted on powerful hunters, and 
looking all over like goers. There was every type of the 
genus sporting man, — stout, square farmers, with honest 
bull-dog physique, characteristic of John Bull plebeian; 
wild young Cantabs, mounted showily from livery-stables, 
with the fair, fearless, delicate features characteristic of 
John Bull patrician; steady old whippers-in, very sus- 
picious of brandy ; wrinkled feeders, with stentorian voices 
that the wildest puppy had learned to know and dread ; 
the courteous, cordial, aristocratic M. F. H., with the men 
of his class, the county gentry, rough, ill-looking cads, 
awkward at all things save crossing country ; no end of 
pedestrians, nearly run over themselves, and falling into 
everybody s way; and last, but you are very sure, in our 
eyes, not least, the ladies who had come to see the hounds 
throw off at Euston Hpllows. 

De Yigne exchanged his reeking hack for his own 
hunter, a splendid gray thorough-bred, with as much light 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


37 


action, he said, as a danseuse, and as much strength and 
power as a bargeman. Then he and we rode up to valk to 
Mrs. L’Estrange, the M. F. H.’s wife, whom everybody 
called Flora, who was mounted on a beautiful little mare, 
and intended to follow her husband and his hounds over 
the Cambridge fences. 

“Who is that lady yonder?” asked De Yigne, after he 
had chatted some moments with her. 

“The one on the horse with a white star on his fore- 
head? Lady Blanche Fairelesyeux. Don’t you know 
her? She is a widow, and a very pretty and rich one, 
too.” 

“Yes, yes, I know Lady Blanche,” laughed De Yigne. 
“ She married old Faire two years ago, and persuaded him 
to drink himself to death most opportunely. No, I meant 
that very handsome woman there, talking to your husband 
at this moment, mounted on a chestnut with a very wild 
eye.” 

“Oh, that is Miss TrefusisI” 

“And can you tell me no more than her mere name?” 

“Not much. She is some relation — what I do not know 
exactly — of that detestable old woman Lady Fantyre, 
w^hose ‘recollections’ of court people are sometimes as 
gross anachronisms as the Comte de St. Germain’s. They 
are staying with Mrs. St. Croix, and she brought them 
here ; but I do not like Miss Trefusis very much myself, 
and Cecil — Mr. L’Estrange — does not wish me to cultivate 
her.” 

“Then I must not ask you to introduce me?” said De 
Yigne, disappointedly. 

“Oh yes, if you wish. I know her w'ell enough for that; 
and she dines here to-night with the St. Croix. But there 
IS a wide difference, you know, between making passing 
acouaintances and ripening them into friends. Come, 
1 . 4 


68 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNi:. 


Captain de Yigne, I am sure you' will ride the hounds ofif 
the scent, or do something dreadful, if I do not let you 
talk to your new beauty,” laughed the young mistress of 
Euston Hollows, turning her mare’s head toward the 
showy chestnut, whose rider had won so much of De 
Vigne’s admiration. 

She was as dashing and magnificent in her way as her 
horse in his : a tall and voluptuously-perfect figure, which 
her tight dark riding-jacket showed in all the beauty of its 
rounded outlines, falling shoulders, and small waist, while 
her little hat, with a single white ostrich feather falling 
down and mingling with the dark massive braids of her 
hair, scarcely shadowed and did not conceal her face, with 
its singularly handsome features, clear aquiline profile, mag- 
nificent eyes, and lips by which Yalasquez or Yandyke 
would have sworn, though they were too haughty, and too 
indicative of an imperious and unyielding nature to please 
me. Splendid she was, and she had spared no pains to 
make the tableau ; and though, to a keen eye, her brilliant 
color, which was not rouge, and her penciled eyebrows, 
which were tinted, gave her a trifle of the actress or the 
lorette style, there was no wonder that De Yigne, impress- 
ible as a Southern by women’s beauty — and at that time, 
as long as it was beauty, not caring much of what stamp 
or of what order — was not easy till Flora L’Estrange had 
introduced him to Constance Trefusis. So we rush upon 
our doom I So we, in thoughtless play, twist the first 
gleaming and silky threads of the fatal cord that will cling 
about our necks, fastened beyond hope of release, as long 
as our lives shall last I Constance Trefusis, surrounded as 
she was by the best men of the Yiewaway, ruling them by 
force of that superb form and face— not by wit or con- 
versation, for she had not overmuch of that, save a shrewd 
sarcastij rejoinder now and then — bowed very graciously 


GRANVILLE PE V^IGNE. 


39 


to De Yigne, and smiled upon him with her rose-hued lips. 
He had caught her eyes upon him once or twice before ho 
had asked Mrs. L’Estrange who she was; and now, dis- 
placing the others with that calm, unconscious air of supe- 
riority, the more irritating to his rivals that it was invari- 
ably successful, he leaned his hand on the pommel of her 
saddle, and talked away to her on the chit-chat of the hour, 
which, however commonplace the subject, he knew how to 
treat so as to give it a piquance and an interest quite 
foreign to itself. 

The Trefusis, as all the men called her, intended to follow 
the hounds, as well as L’Estrange’s wife and Lady Blanche 
Fairelesyeux, (the little widow being well known in most 
hunting countries, and having more than once seen the 
finish in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire runs;) so 
De Yigne and his new acquaintance rode off together as 
the hounds, symmetrical in form, and all in good condition, 
though they were a provincial establishment, trotted away, 
with waving sterns and eager eyes, to draw the Euston 
Hollows covert. “ Will Trefusis or Reynard win the day 
I wondered, as I saw De Yigne pay much more attention 
to the white teeth and oriental eyes of his handsome Ama- 
zon than to the fidgety gambols of his gray Berwick. 

There was not long much doubt about it. The cheery 
Halloo I” rang over coppice and brushwood and planta- 
tion, the white sterns of the dogs flourished among the 
dark-brown bushes of the cover, the mellow horn rang out 
in joyous triumph, stentorian lungs shouted out the deli- 
cious “ Stole away I — hark for-r-r-r-rard 1” and as the finest 
fox in the county broke away, De Yigne stuck his spurs 
into his hunter’s flanks, and rattled down the cover, all his 
thoughts centered on the clever little pack that streamed 
along before him ; and the whole field burst away over the 
low parterres and oak fences and ox- rails, across which, the 


40 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


fox was leading us. I dashed along the three first meadows, 
only divided by low hedges that a Shetland could have taken 
with all the excitement and breathlessness of a first start; 
but as we crossed the fourth at an easy gallop, cooling the 
horses before the formidable leap which we knew the Cam, 
or rather a narrow sedgy tributary of it, would give us at 
the bottom of it, I took breath, and looked around. Before 
any of ns, De Vigne was going along as straight as an 
arrow’s flight, working Berwick up for the approaching 
trial, never looking back, gone into the sport before him as 
if he never had had, and never could have had, any other 
interest in life. The Trefusis, riding as few women could, 
sitting well down in her saddle, like any of the Pytchley or 
Belvoir men, was some yards behind him, “riding jealous,” - 
I could see; rather a hopeless task for a young lady with 
a man known in the hunting-field as Granville was. The 
M. F. H. was, of course, handling his hunter like the mas- 
terly whip he was, his little wife keeping gallantly up with 
him, though she and her mare, so slight and so graceful were 
they, looked as likely to be smashed by the first staken- 
bound fence as a Sevres figure or a Parian statuette. Cur- 
ly, who, thanks to his half-broken hunter, had split four 
strong oak bars, and been once pitched neck and crop into 
Cambridge mud, was coming along with his pink sadly 
stained, but his pluck game as ever. Lady Blanche and 
four of the men were within a few paces of him, while the 
rest of the field were scattered far and wide : quaint bits 
of scarlet, green, and black dotting the short brown turf 
of the pasture land. 

Splash went the fox into the sedgy water of this branch 
of classic Cara, and scrambled up upon the opposite bank. 
For a second the hounds lost the scent; then they threw 
up their heads with a joyous challenge, breasted the stream, 
dashed on after him, and sped along beyond the pollards 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


41 


on the opposite side far ahead of ns, streaming along like 
the white tail of a comet. De Yigne put his gray at the 
yawning ditch, but before he could lift him over it the Tre 
fnsis, striking her chestnut savagely, cleared it with un 
blanched cheek and unshaken nerve. She looked back 
with a laugh, not of gay girlish merriment, such as Flora 
L’Estrange would have done, but a laugh with a certain 
scorn and gratified malice in it, and he gave a muttered 
oath at being cut down by a woman as he landed his grey 
Deside her, and dashed onward. 

I cleared it, so did the M. F. H., and, by some species 
of sporting miracle, so did his wife and her little mare. 
Sworn to the chase as the gallant master of the Yiewaways 
was, he could not help now and then turning his head with 
a word of admonition or advice to his plucky little Flora; 
a weakness for which I, being about half his age, and, 
consequently, much more up to life and steeled to women, 
regarded him with consummate contempt. One of the 
yeomen found a watery bed among the tadpoles, clay, and 
rushes — it might be a watery grave, for anything I know 
to the contrary — and poor dear Curly was tumbled straight 
off his young one, and he and his horse lay there, a help- 
less mass of human and equine flesh, while Lady Blanche 
lifted her roan over him, with a gay, unsyrapathizing 
“Keep still, or Mazeppa will damage you I” 

The run had lasted but ten minutes and a half as yet, 
and the hounds, giving tongue in joyous concert, led the 
way for those who could follow them, over blackthorn 
hedges, staken-bound fences, and heavy-plowed lands, while 
the fox was heading for Sifton Wood, where, once lodged, 
we should never unearth him again. We could not see 
him, but the dogs never once lost scent, and on we went at 
a killing pace, De Yigne, happy fellow ! riding on oefor© 
any of as even before the Trefusis, by two lengths. 

4 * 


GRANVILLE PE VIGNE. 


it 


Half a mile before Sifton Wood there was a cramped 
and awkward leap ; a high, stiff, straggling hedge, with a 
ditch— confound the Cambridge ditches !— Heaven knows 
how wide, immediately before it, almost as bad as a Heices- 
tershire bullfinch, a leap to tax a man’s skill and his horse’s 
powers, and which a woman might pardonably fear, with 
all the courage in the world. Absorbed as I was in work- 
ing up my hunter for the leap, I looked to see if the Tre- 
fusis funked it. Not she; and she cleared it, too, lifting 
her chestnut high in the air, over the ugly blackthorn 
boughs; but on the other side the chestnut fell forward, 
and stumbled on his, head, so they told me afterward. The 
courtly M. F. H. stopped to offer her assistance, but she 
waved him on. De Vigne (will he lose your liking, made- 
moiselle?) had forgotten his chivalry in the chase, and 
dashed straight on without looking back ; while, picking 
up her hunter, the Trefusis remounted and rode forward 
with damaged habit but undaunted spirit. Lady Blanche’s 
Mazeppa refused the leap; and with a little petulant 
French oath she rode farther down, to try and find a gap ; 
and my luckless underbred one flung me over his head, 
rolling on his back, and looking piteous to the last extrem- 
ity in his improvised couch of rushes, nettles, mud, and 
duckweed, and before either he or I could pick ourselves 
up and shake off the humiliating slough, the fox was killed, 
and the glorious whoop of triumph came ringing far over 
plantations and pastures, on the clear October air. 

With not a few anathemas on the cruel fate that had 
shut me out from the honors of the finish, I rode through 
the gap lower down that Lady Blanche had found, and 
made my way to those luckier mortals who had had the 
glory of being in at the death. The brush had been 
awarded to De Yigne by the old huntsman, who might 
have given it to the Trefusis, for she was but a yard or two 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


43 


behind him; but Squib had no tenderness for the sex; 
indeed, he looked on them as having no earthly business in 
the field, and gave it with a gruff word of compliment to 
Granville, who of course handed it to Miss Trefusis, but 
claimed the right of sending it up to town to be mounted 
in ivory and gold for her. That dashing Amazon herself 
Bat on her trembling and foam-covered chestnut with the 
dignity and royal beauty of Cynisca, returning from the 
Olympian games ; and De Yigne seemed to think nothing 
more attractive than this haughty, triumphant, imperial 
Constance, who had skill and pluck worthy a Pytchley 
Nestor. I preferred little Flora’s girlish pity for the “ poor 
dear fox,” and her pathetic lamentation to her husband 
that she “dearly loved the riding, but she would rather 
never see the finish.” However, as De Yigne said the 
morning before, chacun a son gout; if we all liked the same 
style of woman, where should we be ? We rival and jostle 
and hate each other enough as it is about that center of all 
mischief, the beau sexe, Heaven knows I 

We had another run that day, but it was a very slow 
affair. We killed the fox, but he made scarcely any run- 
ning at all, and we might have scored it almost as a blank 
day but for our first glorious twenty minutes, one of the 
fastest things I ever knew, from Euston Hollows to Sifton 
Wood. Lady Blanche went back in ill-humor; missing 
i,nat ditch had put the pretty widow in dudgeon for all 
day ; but Flora L’Estrange and her little mare, which 
merited its name Petite, kept with us all the time, and Con- 
stance Trefusis — well, it’s my firm conviction that Mazep- 
pa’s gallop would not have tired that woman, and she rode, 
as De Yigne observed admiringly to me, with as firm a seat 
and as strong a hand as any rough-rider’s. Excellence in 
his own art pleased him, I suppose, for he watched her 
more and more, and rode back to Euston Hollows with her 


44 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


through the gloaming, some nine miles from where the last 
fox was killed, looking down on her haughty beauty with 
bold, tender glances. 


PART THE SECOND 

I. 

THE PATTE DE VELOURS STRIKES ITS FIRST WOUND IN TUB 
ACADEMIC SHADES OF GRANTA. 

L’Estrange had bid us send our things over to his 
house, and make our toilettes there, after the day’s sport; 
and after we had had what refection we preferred, (we had 
all scorned luncheon that morning, save the sherry Flora 
bad drunk from her husband’s flask and the cherry brandy 
the Trefnsis had condescended to take out of De Yigne’s, 
with a cigar from his case, after the Sifton Wood run,) we 
were glad to perform our ablutions, and get out of Cam- 
bridge mud into dinner toilettes. When at last we went 
down into the drawing-room, we found Constance Trefusis 
in black tulle, with crimson fuchsia and japonica flung here 
and there on the skirt, and crimson flowers on her superb 
jetty braids, sitting on an amber satin couch, queening it 
over the county men, a few college fellows or professors, 
and the borough and county members. There was Mrs. 
St. Croix and her two daughters, showy, flighty, hawked- 
about women, and the Gwyn-Erlens, fresh, nice-looking 
girls, with whom Mrs. L’Estrange seemed to fraternize 
immensely; and Lady Blanche, recovered from her ill- 
humor, and ready to shoot down any game, worth or not 
worth the hitting; and the Countess of Turquoise, who 
thought very few people knew what fun was, she told me, 
and instanced the dreary social torture called dining out, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


45 


and Mrs. Fitzrubric, a bishop’s wife, staying in the neigh- 
borhood, who considered the practice of giving buns at 
school feasts sensual, but showed no disrelish for cham- 
pagne and mock turtle; and there was that “detestable 
old woman,” according to Flora, the Lady Fantyre, widov?" 
of an Irish peer, a little, shriveled, witty, nasty-thinking, 
and amusing-talking old lady, with a thin, sharp face, a 
hooked nose, very keen, bright, cunning, quizzical eyes, a 
very candid wig, and unmistakable rouge, who chattered 
away in a shrill treble of intimate acquaintance with court 
celebrities, some of whom, certainly, she could never have 
known, for the best of reasons, that they were dead before 
she was born, and who, having seen a vast deal of life, not 
all of the nicest, and picked up a good deal of information, 
passed current in nine cases out of ten, with her apocryphal 
stories and well-worn title, which covered, on disait, a mul- 
titude of sins, as coronets do and charity doesn’t, but was 
“not visited” where her departed lord’s rank might have 
entitled her to be, partly because she had a rather too 
marked skill at cards, chiefly, I have no doubt, because she 
had no heavy balance at any bank, the only bank from 
which she ever drew being the Homburg and the Baden, 
and was obliged to live by her wits, those wits being repre- 
sented by the four honors and the odd trick. If poor old 
Fantyre had had a half million or so at Barclay’s, I dare 
say the charitable world would have let her buy oblivion 
for all the naughty secrets hidden in her old wigged head 1 
“Diana turned to Yenus, and no mistake,” whispered 
Curly to me, as we looked at the Trefusis, her beauty 
heightened by her skill in her toilette, which was as taste- 
ful as a Parisienne’s, and would have chimed in with all 
M. Chevreul’s artistic notions. De Yigne, the moment he 
entered, crossed over to her, and, seating himself, began 
to t,a]k; and whether the lustrous gaze of his eyes, which 


46 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


knew how to express their admiration, got their admiration 
returned, or whether she had wit enough to appreciate the 
superiority of his conversation, where the true gold of real 
sense and talent rang out in distinction to the second-hand 
platitudes and Pwwc-^-cribbed mots of the generality of 
people, I will not pretend to decide. At any rate, by some 
«pell or other he distanced his rivals by many lengths, 
though I do not think, then, he cared very much about 
doing it, beyond liking to have the handsomest woman in 
the room to himself. They naturally spoke of the run of 
that morning, and Constance Trefusis, flirting her fan with 
stately movement, and turning her full glittering eyes upon 
him, asked, “Captain De Yigne, what do you think you 
did this morning that pleased me 

De Vigne expressed his happiness that any act of his 
should do so. 

*‘It was when we took that ditch by Sifton Wood, and 
my stupid chestnut fell with me. You rode on, and never 
looked back; your thoughts were with the hounds, not 
with me.” 

“You are more forgiving to my discourtesy than I can 
be to myself,” smiled De Vigne. “What you are so gen- 
erous as to pardon I cannot recall without shame.” 

“Then you are very silly,” she interrupted him. “A 
man in a time of excitement or danger should have some- 
thing better to think about than a woman.” 

“It is difficult, with Miss Trefusis before us, to think 
there can be anything better than a woman,” whispered De 
Vigne. 

She looked at him and smiled, too, with something of the 

malice in it as when she cleared the Cam before him a 

smile that at once repulsed and fascinated, annoyed and 
piqued him. Just then the dinner was announced. L’E.s- 
trange took away my bewitching Countess of Turquoise, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


47 


with whom, in five minutes, I had gone straight off into 
love for her beaux yeux. Curly led in Julia St. Croix, 
with whom he seemed wonderfully struck. Heaven knows 
why, except that youiig fellows will go down before any 
battered or war-worn arrows at times. Little Flora was 
victimized by Turquoise himself, a vain, dull, stupid owl, 
and wished, I believe, in her secret heart, that social laws 
allowed her to go in with her beloved Cecil, (she was very 
young, remember, madarae ; we do not expect any such 
betises from you;) and De Yigne gave his arm to the Tre- 
fusis, to whom he talked during all the courses with a 
devouement that must have interfered with his proper ap- 
preciation of the really masterly productions of the Euston 
Hollows chef, and the very excellent hock and claret of 
L’Estrange’s cellar. Whether he had much response I 
cannot say — I was too absorbed in looking at Lady Tur- 
quoise from far too respectful a distance to please me — I 
should fancy not, for the Trefusis was never, that I heard, 
much famed for conversation ; but some way or other she 
fascinated him with her basilisk beauty, and when Flora 
gave the move she looked into his eyes rather warmly for 
an acquaintance not twelve hours old as yet. We were 
some little time before we followed them, for De Yigne 
and L’Estrange and the members got on the Reform Bill, 
and Granville and our host being the only two Liberals 
against a whole troop of Conservatives, they did not get off 
it again in a hurry; and though Lady Turquoise was be- 
witching, and the Trefusis’ eyes magnificent, and the St. 
Croix very effective as they sang duets in studied poses, 
Chateau Margaux and unfettered talk were more attrac- 
tive to us, ungallant though it might be. When we returned 
to the drawing-rooms, De Yigne took up his station beside 
the Trefusis again, and, throwing his arm over the back 
of her chair, bent down till his whiskers almost touched 


48 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the crimson wreath upon her hair, paying her strikingly 
marked attention, while Flora L’Estrange sang charming 
little French chansons, and the St. Croix tortured us with 
bravuras, and that cruel Countess of Turquoise flirted with 
the county member. What an intolerably empty-headed 
coxcomb, he seemed to me, I remember I 

“What a fine creature that Trefusis is!” said De Vigne, 
as he drove us back to Cambridge in a dog-cart. “ On my 
life, she is a magnificent woman 1 Arthur, she reminds me 
of somebody or other — I can’t tell whom — somebody, I 
dare say, I saw in Spain or in Italy, or in India, per- 
haps.” 

“ Shall I tell you,” said Curly. 

“Yes, pray do; but you’ve never been about with me, 
old boy, how should you know?” 

“I was with you at the Chancery, and I haven’t forgot- 
ten Lucy Davis.” 

“Lucy Davis I” exclaimed De Yigne, the light of old 
days breaking in upon him, half faded, half familiar. “By 
Jove I she is something like that girl. I declare I had 
forgotten that schoolboy episode. Curly. So she is like 
her — if Lucy had been a lady instead of a dressmaker. 
The deuce I I hadn’t bad taste then, boy as I was. How 
many things of that kind one has and forgets!” 

“Lucy didn’t look like a woman who’d allow herself to 
be forgotten. She’d make you remember her by fair means 
or foul,” said Curly. 

“What! do you recollect her so well, young one?” 
laughed De Yigne. “ She seems to have made more im- 
pression upon you than, I must say, she has done on me. 
There was the very devil in that girl, poor thing, young 
as she was. She was bold, bad, hardened to the core, I 
am afraid. Child as she was, she could entice to perfec- 
ifioQ, but of loving she had no more notion than a stone, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


49 


%nd yet she was at an age when girls do love, or rather 
fancy they do, if ever they will in their lives. Faugh I the 
broken hearts and the betrayed affections poets and parsons 
weep over, and women and newspapers lay upon our backs, 
where do we find them ? Do you suppose the first step to 
liaises sins or Messalina’s depravities was Love? I vow 
it is too bad to stick on to the grande passion all the 
blame of vain, coarse, avaricious, finery-loving women’s 
errors, nine-tenths of whom never could have loved any- 
thing but gold, or dress, or their own faces. Pshaw 1 the 
sentiment that goes about in our day would sicken a cat, 
if brutes were not too wise to lend their ears to all the 
bosh of humankind. But about this Trefusis, Curly. She 
does bring that girl to my mind, certainly, and there is in 
her something there was in Lucy Davis — a something in- 
tangible which repels, while her exterior beauty allures. 
Perhaps it is in both alike — a cold heart within.” 

“If we were only allured where there are warm hearts, 
we should keep in a blessed state of indifference,” said I, 
thinking savagely of Lady Turquoise and that confounded 
county member. 

“ Hallo, Arthur ! what has turned you cynic ?” laughed De 
Vigne. “ Only this very morning were you sentimentalizing 
over the ‘ Lady of Shalott,’ and wanting to inflict it on me.” 

“Yes, and you stopped me with the abominable quota- 
tion, ‘Ass ! am I onion-eyed V ” 

“Well, that showed two things in my favor: first, that 
I’d read Shakspeare — thank God for him I — and, second, 
that I haven’t atrocious taste enough to call your senti- 
mental mannerists of the present day by the highest title 
I can give Ben Jonson’s ‘Dear Willie’ — Poet. Confound 
it, how dark it is I Is that a milestone, or a ghost? What- 
ever it is, the mare doesn’t admire it. Gently, old girl I — 
quiet 1 quiet 1” 


5 


50 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ I say, De Yigne,” said Curly, when the mare had come 
down on her forelegs again, and consented to trot onward, 
“T wish you’d tell us how that affair with Lucy Davis 
ended I Chevasney and I saw you quarreling the day 
before you left.” 

“I never quarreled,” said De Yigne, contemptuously. 
*‘I never do with anybody; if they don’t say what I like, 
I tell them my mind at once, and there’s an end of it ; but 
quarreling’s a nasty, petty, jangling, lowering sort of thing. 
I never quarrel I Let me see, what did happen that day ? 
1 remember : I met Lucy that evening as I was going into 
Frestonhills, and when I told her I was about to leave, she 
demanded — what do you think? — nothing less than a 
promise of marriage ! Only fancy — from me to her I She 
even said I had made her one. I couldn’t have done, you 
know. I’ve been guilty of many mad things, but never of 
one quite so insane as that. I told her flatly it was a lie 
— so it was, and it put me in a passion to be saddled with 
such an atrocious falsehood. I never can stand quietly and 
see people trying to chisel me, you know. I told her it 
was a falsehood, and she could not go on asserting it ; so, 
like most people when they are in the wrong, but won’t 
admit it, she went off into one of those virago storms of 
hers, of which I had already experienced enough to sicken 
me. I offered to do anything she liked for her ; to provide 
for her in any way she chose; and so I would, for I was 
quite a boy, and really pitied her from my soul for being 
unprovided for and unprotected at so early an age. But 
not a word would she hear from me; she was mad, I sup- 
pose, because she could not startle or chicane me into ad- 
mitting the promise of marriage, having possibly in her 
eye the heavy damages an enlightened court would grant 
to her ‘innocent years’ and her ‘wrongs!’ At any rate, 
she would not hear a word I said, but she poured her in- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


61 


vectives into my ear, letting out that she had never loved 
me, but had intended to make me a stepping-stone to the 
money and rank she was always pining after ; that, having 
failed, she hated me — she spoke the truth there, 1 believe 
— and that before she died she would be revenged on me. 
Heaven knows what she did not say; I can’t recollect half; 
but being very young then, and not used to violent-tempered 
women, and having had besides a boy’s hot, blind, and gen- 
erous attachment to her for the time, when she left me with 
something very like curses, I remember I stood there with 
a curious chill over me, half of belief in her threats of ven- 
geance, half of the disappointment that, when one grows 
older, one gets used to, as a matter of course, bat, when 
one is new to life, gives one sharp twinges — in being be- 
trayed, and finding our fancied angels turn out devils, and 
very spiteful, false-hearted devils too. So Lucy Davis and 
I parted, and that is the last I heard of or from her. 
Though she did hate me so, she liked my shawls, and my 
jewelry, and little things I had given her, well enough to 
keep them ; or rather, no doubt they were all she had liked 
me for, I should say. I wonder what has become .of her? 
It’s easy enough to conjecture, poor creature I” 

“Ah, I wonder !” responded Curly. “By George I what 
an amusing idea to think of her revenging herspifupon you. 
She’d be puzzled to do it, I fancy.” 

“ Rather,” laughed De Vigne, reining up hir' mare; “but 
women say anything in a passion. Lucy Davis had gone 
straight out of my mind till you said that handsome Tre- 
fusis made you think of her. I am glad the St. Croix and 
L’Estranges are coming to lunch with you. Curly; I want 
to see more of my imperial Constance, and must be back 
at Yigne by Saturday. Sabretasche, and Pigott, and 
Severn, and no end of men are coming down for the pheas- 
ants. 1 wish you were there too, old fellows. Good night I 


52 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Au revoirl” And De Yigne set us down before old Trin- 
ity, and drove on to the Bull, where he was staying, smok- 
ing, and thinking, very likely, of Constance Trefusis. 

Oh, those jolly Cambridge days I The Inchley Grind that 
I won by a neck, distancing Biddulph, of Christ’s, who 
made so very sure of himself and his horse; the splendid 
manner in which we bumped Corpus and Katherine Hall, 
and carried oif the Challenge Cup, to the envy of all the 
University; the row and scuffle of Town and Gown rows, 
dear to the inborn British passion for hard hits, where 
Curly knocked a cobbler down and then gave him in charge 
for assault; the skill with which that mischievous young 
Honorable caught his whip round the shovel-hat of a dean, 
raising that venerated article of dress in mid-air, only es- 
caping rustication by dashing on with his tandem-team too 
quickly for identification, — were they not all written in their 
day among the records of Trinity men’s larks ? 

We used to vow we were confoundedly tired of Granta, 
and so I dare say we might feel at the time, but how pleas- 
ant they were, those light-hearted college days ! — the honors 
of the Kight-oar; the thrashing of the Marylebone Eleven; 
the rattle cross country for the Cesare witch or the Cam- 
bridge Sweepstakes ; the flirtations of pretty shop-girls in 
Petty Cury or Trumpington Street; the raving politics of 
the Union, occasional prelude to triumphs forensic and sen- 
atorial; the noisy epicureanism of wines, where scanty 
humor woke more merriment than wittiest mots twenty 
years after, and Cambridge port passed with a flavor that 
no olives or anchovies can give to comet claret now. How 
pleasant they were those jolly college days I As I think 
of them, how many kindly faces and joyous voices rise be- 
fore me I Where are they now ? Some lying with the 
colors on their breast beside the Euxine Sea ana along 
the line of the Pacific; some struck down by the assassin’s 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


53 


knife in the temples at Cawnpore; some sleeping in eternal 
sleep beneath the sighing of the Delhi palms, or the sad 
rhythm of the Atlantic waves; some wasting classic elo- 
quence on country hinds in moss-grown village churches; 
some fighting the great fight between science and death 
in the crowded hospital wards of London ; some wearing 
honor, and honesty, and truth from their hearts in the 
breathless up-hill press of the great world; — all of them, 
living or dead, scattered far away about the earth, since the 
days when in our unspent strength and our undamped 
spirits, and our wild, wayward, careless youth, we lived in 
the shadow of the gray academic walls I 

The time to lionize Cambridge, as everybody knows, is 
May and June, when the backs are in all their sylvan glory, 
when the graceful spires of King’s rise up against the fair 
blue skies, only shadowed by fleecy clouds, the white towers 
of John’s stand bosomed in green leafy shades, the Trinity 
limes fill the air with fragrance, the sun peers through the 
great shadowy elm-boughs of Neville’s Court, and the brown 
Cam flows under its graceful bridges, with water-lilies and 
forget-me-nots on its breast, gliding with subdued murmur, 
as though conscious that it was in classic shades, through 
vistas of waving boughs, past gray, stately college walls, 
bringing into the grave haunts of learning the glad and 
vernal freshness of the spring. May is the time for Cam- 
bridge; still, even in October, we managed to give the 
L’Estranges and the St, Croix a very good reception. 
Women are sure to be royally fetees by Cantabs, and our 
guests were calculated to excite the envy of all the Univer- 
sity, Flora L’Estrange was pretty enough to bewitch 
Newton from his pedestal; Lady Blanche (whose dower 
house was but a mile or two from Euston Hollows) came 
with them, and to get a sight of the widow all Granta 
would have turned out any day. The two St. Croix were 

5 * 


54 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


dashing womiL, and I have told you before all that Con- 
stance Trefv.'sis was in form and feature. We did the Hong 
with very little architectural appreciation, but the science 
of eyes and smiles is a pleasanter one any day than the 
science of styles and orders; and we were quite as con- 
tented, and I have no doubt much better amused, than 
if, Ruskin a la main, we had been competent to pull to 
pieces the beauty of King’s, and prate of “severity” and 
“purity.” Happy in our barbarianism, we crossed the 
Bridge of Sighs with a laugh at old Fantyre’s jokes, 
strolled down the Fellowship Walk, telling Julia St. Croix, 
who had not two ideas in her head, that Bacon’s Gate 
would to a surety fall down on her; went in at Humility, 
through Virtue, and out at Honor, flirting desperately 
under those grave archways, and hurried irreverently 
through the libraries, where reading men, cramming in 
niches, looked up, forgetting their studies at the rustle of 
Lady Blanche’s silk flounces, and Thorwaldsen’s Byron 
seemed to glance with Juanesque admiration at the 
superb eyes of the Trefusis as she lifted them to that 
statue, which does indeed, as the poet himself averred, 
make a shocking nigger of him. 

“ How strange it seems to me,” said De Vigne, as, enter- 
ing King’s Chapel, we brushed against one of the senior 
Fellows, who had dozed away in college chambers all the 
beauty and prime of his life — “how incomprehensible, that 
men can pass a whole existence in the sort of chrysalis 
state of which one sees so much in university walls. That 
fellow is a King’s man ; he obtained his fellowship by right, 
his degree without distinction. He lives on, fuddling his 
small brains — for small they must be, as he has never 
worked them since he got his Eton captaincy — with port, 
and playing solemn rubbers, and eating heavy dinner's, lill 
a living falls as fat as his avarice can desire. He has no 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


55 


thoughts, no ambition, no home, no sphere beyond the aca- 
demic pale, and no sympathy with the heart-throbs of 
warmer, stronger human nature.” 

“And no love, I dare say, save audit, and no mistress 
save turtle-soup,” laughed Flora L'Estrange. 

“ Perhaps he bad once, one whom her own will, or his 
own egotism, gendered by the selfish creed taught by the 
celibate obligation of the fellowship system, parted from 
him long ago,” said Curly, with a tender glance at that 
very practical-minded flirt, Julia St. Croix. 

“That’s right. Curly,” said De Yigne, amusedly, “make a 
romance of it. Fellows of colleges, with snuff and whist, and 
dry routine, are such appropriate subjects for sentiment ! 
But after all. Miss Trefusis, that man is not a greater marvel 
to me than one of those classico.1 scholars who is nothing 
hut a classical scholar, such as one meets here and in Ox- 
ford, binding down his ambitions to the elucidation of a 
dead tongue, exhausting his energies in the evolving of 
decayed philosophies, spending, as Pelham says, ‘one long 
school-day of lexicons and grammars,’ his memory the 
charnel-house for the bones of a lifeless language, his brain 
enacting the mechanical role of a dictionary or an encyclo- 
pedia, living all his life without human aspirations or hu- 
man sympathies, and in his death leaving no void among 
men, not missed even by a dog.” 

“It would not suit you?” asked the Trefusis, smiling. 

“No, no,” chuckled the old Fantyre to herself, “he’ll 
have his pleasure, I take it, cost him what it may.” 

“I!” echoed De Vigne, “chained down to the limits Oi 
a commentator’s studies or a Hellenist’s laborsi Heaven 
forbid! I love excitement, action, change; a mill-wheel 
monotony would be the death of me. I would rather have 
storms to encounter, than no movement to keep me alive.” 

“i^re you so changeable, then?” 


56 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Well, yes> I fancy I am. At least, I never met any- 
thing that could chain me long as yet.’^ 

He laughed as he spoke, leaning against one of the stalls, 
the sun streaming through the rich stained glass full upon 
his face, with its delicate aristocratic features, and his dark 
Justrous eyes gleaming with amusemeHt at a thousand 
reminiscences evoked by her speech. The Trefusis looked 
at him with a curious smile, perhaps of will to chain the 
restless and wmyward spirit, perhaps of pique at his care- 
less words, perhaps of longing to conquer and to win him ; 
it might have been hate, but — it certainly was not love. 
Still, Flora L’ Estrange, who was a clever little thing, 
whispered to her husband, — 

“Miss Trefusis will win Captain De Yigne if she can.” 
L’ Estrange laughed, and looked at Granville and his 
companion, as they were, in appearance, discussing the 
subjects of the storied windows of Holy Henry’s chapel, 
but talking, I fancy, of other topics than sacred art o? 
history. 

“ Quite right, my pet, but I hope she wonH. I woulf: as 
soon see him marry a tigress.” 

Tired of lionizing, we soon returned to Curly’s rooms, 
where you are sure the most recherche luncheon that could 
be had out of Cambridge shops and Trinity buttery, witli 
London wine, and game from his governor’s preserves^ was 
ready for us. Curly never did anything without duing it 
well, and his rooms were, J think, the most luxuriously got 
up in all Granta, with his grand piano, his bronzes, and his 
landscapes, mixed up so queerly with tobacco-pots, boxing- 
gloves, pipes, and portraits of ballet-pets and heroes of 
the Turf, yet an essentially charming and comfortable and 
inviting tout ensemble, much more so than if it had had 
the dusters of a score of housemaids, or the keen eyes of a 
hundred “managing women” to put it “to righcs.” The 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


5T 

luncheon was as merry as it was elaborate in comestibles — 
what college meal, with wild dashing Cantabs, and fast, 
pretty women at the board, ever was not? — and while the 
Badminton and champagne-cup went round, and the gyps 
waited as solemnly and dreadfully as gyps ever do on like 
occasions, a cross-fire of wit and fun and nonsense shot 
across the table and mingled with the perfume of Curly’s 
hot-house bouquets enough to bring the stones of time-hon- 
ored Trinity about our irreverent heads. De Yigne, in 
very high spirits that day, laughed and talked with all the 
brilliance for which society had distinguished him; Flora 
and Lady Blanche were always full of mischievous repartee; 
Curly and Julia St. Croix flirted so desperately, that if it 
had not been for the publicity of the scene, I believe the 
boy would have gone straight away into a proposal. Lady 
Fantyre, especially, when the claret cup had gone round 
freely, was so utterly amusing that we forgot she was old, 
and the Trefusis, if she did not contribute equally to the 
conversation, sat beside De Vigne, darting glances at him 
from her large black eyes, and looking handsome enough 
to be inspiration to anybody. 

“So you leave to-morrow?” she said, as they were wait- 
ing for the St. Croix carriage to take them home again. 

“Yes. If you were going to remain I should stay too; 
but Mrs. St. Croix tells me you leave on Monday,” said 
De Vigne, in a low tone, with an admiring glance, to 
which few women would have been insensible. 

She looked at him with that cold, malicious smile, which, 
had I been he, would have made me very careful of that 
woman. 

“It is easy to say that when, as I am going on Monday, 
1 cannot put you to the test.” 

De Vigne’s eyes flashed ; he threw back his head coldly 
and haughtily. 


58 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“I never irouhle myself to say what I do not mean, Miss 
Tiefusis.” 

She smiled again ; she had found she had power to 
pique him. 

“Then will you come and see me in town after Christ- 
mas 

What he answered I know not, but I dare say it was in 
the affirmative; he would hardly have refused anything to 
such a glance as she gave him. He lingered beside their 
carriage, and looked with ardent admiration at her as he 
pressed her lavender-gloved hand in farewell, and stood in 
the Trinity gateway with a smile on his lips, watching her 
roll away, tvdsting in his fingers a white azalea she had 
given him; but, two hours after, the flower was thrown 
into the college grate, and the bedmaker swept it out with 
the cinders. So he was not very far gone as yet. 


II. 


THE MAJOR OF THE DASHERS. 

The next morning, after we had “done chapel,” De 
Vigne, w'ho had sent on his groom, hunters, and luggage 
the day before, walked down to the station, and we with 
him. 

“I wish you two fellows were coming down to Vigne 
with me,” he said, as we went along. “You don’t know 
what a bore it is having a place like that! so much is ex- 
pected of one. You belong to the county, and the county 
makes you feel the relationship pretty keenly, too. You 
must fill the house at Easter, September, and Christmas 
You must hear horrible long speeches from your tenantry, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


59 


wishing you all sorts of health and happiness, while you’re 
wishing them at the devil for bothering you so. You must 
have confounded long interviews with your steward, who 
looks frightfully glum at the pot of money that has been 
dropped over the- Goodwood, and hints at the advisability 
of cutting down the very clump of oaks that makes the 
beauty of the drawing-room view. Then, worst of all, 
you’re expected to hunt your own county, even though it 
be as unfit as the Wash or the Black Forest, while you’re 
burning to be with the Burton or Tedworth, following Tom 
Smith, or Tom Edge, or Pytchley men, who don’t funk at 
every bullfinch.” 

“ Do you hunt the Vigne pack, then, always ?” asked 
Curly. 

“I? No. I never said -I did all those things. I only 
said they are expected of me, and it’s tiresome to say 
no.” 

“As we experience when women make love to us.” 

“I never can say ‘no ’ there,” laughed De Yigne. “I 
am so amiable, I always oblige them. Do you know, I 
sometimes have a fancy to try and turn the part about 
Yigne into a hunting country, as Assheton Smith turned 
Hampshire. I should have no end of opposition — men 
who’d vow, as his governor did to him, that if I rode over 
their lands they’d have me up for trespass; but that would 
be rather fun. It’s pleasant to do things one’s told not 
to do.” 

“ I wonder, then,” said I, “you care to make love to The 
Trefusis, for her eyes say, ‘ Do do it,” as clearly as eyes can 
speak.” 

He laughed. “Yes. I must admit she doesn’t look a 
very impregnable citadel.” 

“Not if you make it worth her while to surrender.” 

“None of them surrender for nothing,” said De Yigne, 


6C 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


smiling. Chacune a son prix — with some it’s cashmeres, 
with others yellow-boys, with some it’s position, with others 
a wedding-ring. I can’t see much difference myself, though 
I’d give cashmeres in plenty, and should be remarkably 
sorry to be chiseled into settlements.” 

“I should fancy so,” said Curly; “only think of the an- 
nihilation of larks, liberty, fun, claret, latch-keys, oyster 
suppers, guinguettes, and Cafes R^gence, expressed in 
those two doomed words, a ‘married man!’ The forcat’s 
mark isn’t more distinctive and more terrible. To my 
mind, marrying’s as bad as hanging, and equally puts a 
finish to all life, properly so called, or worth supporting.” 

“Did you tell Julia your views. Curly ?” asked De Yigne, 
quietly. 

“Pooh ! stuff! What’s Julia to do with me? the girl at 
the Cherryhinton public is a vast lot better-looking,” mut- 
tered Curly, with an embarrassment that made me doubt 
if the limes of Trinity had not heard different opinions 
enunciated with regard to the holy bond. — N. B. Julia St. 
Croix that day three months tied herself to that same 
snuffy, portly, wine-embalmed Fellow she had laughed at 
with us in King’s Chapel. To be sure he had then become 
rector of Snooze-cum-Rest; and when Rutn goes to woo 
Boaz, we may always be pretty certain she knows he is 
master of the harvest, and has the golden wheat-ears in 
her eye, sweet innocent little dear though she looks. 

“ The Cherryhinton public ! I see— that’s why skittles 
and beer have become suddenly delightful,” laughed De 
Yigne. 

“ Why not ?” asked Curly, meekly. “ Skittles are no sin, 
and malt and hops are man’s natural aliment; and as for 
barmaids ! why, if one’s denied houris and nectar, one must 
take to Jane and bitter beer, n’est-ce pas?” 

“Don’t know,” said De Yigne. “I prefer le Quartier 


G&ANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Breda and champagne. As Balzac says, ‘Une femme belle 
comme Galatee ou Hdene ne pourrait me plaire tant soil 
pen qu’elle soil crottee.’” 

“You forgot that once — you didn’t repudiate Lucy 
Davis ?” 

“Lucy was half a lady, in dress at least,” laughed De 
Vigne, “and she got up uncommonly well, too; however, 
that was in my schoolboyish days, and one doesn’t count 
them. After vulguses and problems a kitchenmaid is par- 
donable; and as for the young woman who presides over 
the post-office, or the oyster patties, she is perfectly irresist- 
ible. The laisser aller of the Paphian Temple is so de- 
lightful after the stiff stoicism of the Porch !” 

“ Well, thank Heaven, the Paphian Temple is built every- 
where,” said Curly, “and you find it under the taps (f 
A.K., X. K., and XXX., as well as in the gilt walls of a 
Mayfair boudoir; else the poor devils who haven’t the 
Mayfair key would get locked into very outer darkness 
indeed. Here’s the train just starting. By Jove, that’s 
lucky I All right, old fellow. Here’s Puck ; tumble in, old 
boy.” 

Tumbling in the old boy, (a wiry, hideous terrier, whom 
it was considered really beautiful to see chevying about in 
a barnful of rats,) Ue Vigne seated himself, and was rolled 
off en route to Vigne with a pretty brunette opposite him, 
who seemed imbued with extreme admiration of Puck, or — 
his master. Girls always begin by calling his children 
“little loves ” to a widower, though the brats be as ugly as 
sin, and by admiring his dog to a bachelor, though afraid 
of their lives it should snap at them. 

Curly and I walked back to Granta, and went to console 
ourselves, first with billiards and beer at Brown’s, then with 
gome hard practice on the river. I was in training with 
the Trinity Eight, and at that period confined all my hopes 

VOL.- I. 6 


62 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


to winning pewter, and all ray aspirations to buraping 
John’s and Corpus. Talk of the doctrine of renunciation 1 
Preach it to a fellow who’s been going in for raw steaks, 
few wines, no delicacies, and as small an amount of But- 
tery beer and Cambridge wine as possible, (no great loss 
that last item, entre nous,) and ask him if he’d find it 
either “sweet” or “easy” to choose being bumped, instead 
of bumping I Pooh ! you might as well tell him to pray 
I might cut a crab out of sheer kindness to Christ’s or 
Katherine Hall !” 

Never do I get on boating, or look at the old pewter I 
won when we covered John’s with mortification unspeak- 
able in the run for the Ely Long Challenge Cup, but what 
Cambridge comes back to me in the full swing of all its 
jolly days, and I feel my back bend, my muscle swell, and 
my heart pump like a hammer of twenty-horse power, as I 
used to pull up the Cam in my outrigger or the eight-oar. 
I belong to the Blue Jersey B. C., the first in England; 
but somehow I don’t feel the zest now that I used to feel 
cutting through the water with strong six-foot Monckton 
as stroke, (poor fellow I he went down with jungle fever, 
and is lying in the banyan shadow, in Ceylon sand,) and 
that merry, wicked little dog, Phil Hervey, for coxswain ; 
he’s a bishop now, and hush-hushes you, and strokes his 
apron, if you whisper the smallest crumb of fun over his 
capital comet wine. Dear old Cambridge I I wouldn’t 
give a straw for a Cambridge man who didn’t grow prolix 
as he talked of her, and didn’t empty a bumper of Guin- 
ness’s or Moet — as his taste may lie — in her honor. You 
may try to run up King’s College, Glasgow, St. Bees, and 
all those places, sir, if you choose. They cram well there, 
possibly — I don’t gainsay it— but where is the gentleman- 
like ring, the hearty good-fellowship, the polishing for 
your rough diamond, the leveling for your conceited cox- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


G3 

comb, the perfecting in all muscular and athletic power, to 
be found in the twin universities? A man may read, or 
he may not read, at college. I prefer the boy who knows 
how to feather his scull, to him who only knows Latin 
quantities and Greek unities ; at any rate, he will find his 
level, measure his weight, and learn — unless he be obtuse 
indeed — that through college life, as through all other life, 
the best watchwords are — Pluck and Honor. 

1 learnt that much at least, and it is no mean lesson, 
though I must admit that, after having had my cross taken 
away, been gated times innumerable, having done all the 
books of Virgil by way of penance, (paying little Crip, my 
wine-merchant’s son, to write them out for me,) and been 
shown up before the proctor on no less than six separate 
occasions, I got rusticated in my fourth term, and finally 
took my name off the books. The governor laughed, pre- 
ferred my Grind Cups, and my share in winning the Chal- 
lenge Cup, to any Bell’s or Craven’s scholarships, and paid 
my debts without a murmur. Too good to be true, you 
will say, ami lecteur? No; there are fathers who can 
remember they have been young, though they are unspeak- 
ably rare — as rare as ladies who can let you forget it I 

Now came the question, what should I do ? “ Nothing,” 
the correct thing, according to the governor. “ Stand for 
the county,” my mother suggested. “Go as attache to my 
cousin, the envoy to St. Petersburg,” my relatives opined, 
who had triumphed, with much unholy glory, over my rus- 
tication, as is the custom of relatives from time immemorial. 
As it chanced, I had no fancy for either utter dolce, the 
bray of St. Stephen’s or the snows of Russia, so I put 
down my name for a commission. We had plenty of in- 
terest to push it, and the Gazette soon announced, “ — th 
P. O. Lancers, Arthur Vane Tierney Chevasney, to be 
Cornet, vice James Yelverton, promoted;” and the — th, 


64 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


always known in the service as the Dashers, was De Vigne’s 
troop, my old Frestonhills hero ! 

The Dashers were then quartered at Kensington and 
Hounslow, and the first thing I saw as I drove through 
Knightsbridge was De Yigne’s groom, Harris, riding a 
powerful thorough -bred, swathed in body-clothing, whom I 
recognized as Berwick, famous in the Euston Hollows run. 
You may be very sure that as soon as my interviews with 
the Adjutant and the Colonel were over, I found out De 
Vigne’s rooms as speedily as possible. He had the draw- 
ing-room floor of a house in Kensington Gore, large, lofty 
rooms, with folding-doors, well-furnished, and further em- 
bellished with crowds of things of his own, from Persian 
carpets bought in his travels, to the last new rifle sent 
home only the day before. I made my way up unan- 
nounced, and stood a minute or two in the open doorway. 
They were pleasant rooms, just as a man likes to have 
them, with all the things he wants about him ready to his 
hand; no madarae to make him miserable by putting his 
pipes away out of sight, and no housekeeper to drive him 
distracted by sorting his papers, and introducing order 
among his pet lumber. A setter, a retriever, and a couple 
of Skyes, with Puck bolt upright in the midst of them, 
were on the hearth-rug, (veritable tiger-skin;) breakfast, 
in dainty Sevres and silver, stood on one table, sending 
up a delicious aroma of coffee, omelettes, and devils ; the 
morning papers lay on the floor, a smoking-cap was hung, 
unchivalrously, on a Parian Venus; a parrot, who appar- 
ently considered himself master of the place, was perched 
irreverently on a bronze Milton, and pipes, whips, pistols, 
ind cards were thrown down on a velvet couch that Louise 
de Keroualle or Clara d’Ische might have graced. From 
the inner room there came the rapid clash of smallswords, 
while “Touche, touche, touche? riposte I hola!” was 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


6 ^ 


shouted, in a silvery voice, from a man who, lying back in 
a rocking-chair in the bay-window of the front room, was 
looking on at a bout with the foils that was taking place 
beyond the folding-doors. The two men who were fencing 
were De Vigne and a smaller, slighter fellow, the one calm, 
cool, steady, and never at a disadvantage, the other, skill- 
ful indeed, but too hot, eager, and rapid. In fencing, 
whether with the foils or the tongue, the grand secret is to 
be cool, for in proportion to your tranquillity grows your 
opponent’s exasperation. The man in the bay-window 
was too deeply interested to observe me, so I waited pa- 
tiently till De Yigne had sent the other man’s foil flying 
from his hand, and then I went forward to claim his atten- 
tion. He turned, with one of his sweet, rare, sunny smiles : 
“Ah ! dear old fellow, how are you ? Charmed to see 
you. This is the best move you ever made, Arthur. Mr. 
Chevasney, Colonel Sabretasche, M. de Chetfontaine, a 
trio of my best friends. We only want Curly to make the 
partie carr6e perfect. Sit down, old boy; we have just 
breakfasted, I am sorry to say, but here are the things, and 
all the sardines, and you shall soon have some hot choco- 
late and cotelettes.” 

While he talked be forced me into an arm-chair, and 
disregarding all my protests that I had already breakfasted 
twice — once at Longholme and once at a station — rang 
for his man. De Cheffontaine flung himself on. a sofa, and 
began with a mot on his own defeat; the man in the bay- 
window got lazily out of his rocking-chair and strolled 
over to us; De Vigne took his meerschaum, and we were 
soon talking away as hard as we could go of the belles of 
that season, the pets of the ballet, Richmond, the Spring 
Meetings, the best sales in the yard, the last matches at 
Lord’s, the chances of Heliotrope’s being scratched for the 

6* e 


66 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Goodwood, the certainty that Yane Stevenses roan filly 
would lose the trotting-match, with other like topics, to us, 
at least, of absorbing interest and importance. Sabretasche 
was, I found, a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel and Major of 
the Dashers, and a most agreeable man he seemed, lying 
back in his chair, making us laugh heartily at witticisms 
which he spoke, quietly and indolently, in a soft, low, mel- 
low voice. Had I been a woman, that beautiful face would 
have done for me irretrievably, as, according to report, it 
had done for a good many. Beautiful it was, even to my 
eye; and men value the size of another’s muscle and the 
strength of his sinew more than they do the form of his 
face. But beautiful it was, with its pallid, aristocratic 
features, large, dark, mournful eyes, silky moustache, and 
wavy hair. Reckless devil-may-care, the man looked the 
recklessness of one who heeds nothing in heaven or earth 
— a little hardened by the world and its rubs, rendered 
cynical, perhaps, by injustice and wrong — but in the eyes 
there lay a kindness, and in the mouth a sadness which 
betokened better things. He might have been thirty, five- 
and-thirty, forty. One could no more tell his age than 
his character, though, looking at him, one could fancy it 
true what the world said of him — that no man ever found 
BO faithful a friend, and no woman a more faithless lover 
than Yivian Sabretasche. 

“ Chevasney, who do you think is one of the beautes 
regnantes up here ?” asked De Yigne, pushing me some 
Cubas. 

“How should I know? The Cherryhinton barmaid?” 

“Don’t be a fool.” 

“ The Trefusis, then ?” 

“ Of course. She is still living with that abominable 
i»ld Irishwoman, Lady Fantyre. They’re in Bruton Street 
—a pleasant house, only everybody wonders where the 


QRAJ^VILLE DE VIQNE. 


peeress finds the money. They give uncommonly agree- 
able receptions. Don’t they, Sabretasche ?” 

‘‘Oh, very!” answered the Colonel, with an enigmatical 
smile, “especially to you, I’ve no doubt; and the only tax 
levied on one for the entertainment is to pay a few com- 
pliments to mademoiselle, and a few guinea points to my 
lady. I can’t say all the guests are the best ton ; there 
are too many ladies designated by the definite article, and 
too many gentlemen with cordons in their button-holes; 
but they know how to amuse one another, and the women, 
if not exclusive, are at least remarkably pretty. The Tre- 
fusis is more than pretty, especially smoking a cigarette I 
Shall you allow her cigars when you’re married to her, 
De Vigne ?” 

“Not when I am.” 

“ There’s an unjust fellow I How like a man that is !” 
cried Sabretasche. “What’s charming in any other women 
becomes horrid in his wife. You remind me of Jessie 
Yillars: when her husband smokes, she vows the scent will 
kill her; when Wyndham meets her on the terrace, taking 
his good-night pipe, she lisps there’s nothing so delightful 
as the scent of Cavendish. Come, Mr. Chevasney, I don’t 
mind prying into my friends’ affairs before their faces. 
Have not De Yigne and the Trefusis had some nice little 
flirtation before now ?” 

“ To be sure,” I answered. “ It began to be rather a 
desperate affair ; the Trinity backs could tell you many a 
tale, I dare say. He came down for Diana, and forsook 
her for Yenus.” 

“But you can’t say, old fellow, I ever deserted the quivei 
for the ceinture,” cried De Yigne. “The Yiewaway was 
never eclipsed by the Trefusis I” 

“I don’t know that. Have you taken up the affair 
wboi e you left it ?” 


68 


OEANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ I never reveal secrets that ladies share,” said De Yigne, 
with a comically demure air, “but I’ll be very generous, 
Arthur. I’ll take you to call on her.” 

“Bien oblige. What do you think of this beauty, M. 
de Cheffontaine ?” I asked of the lively little Baron. 

“Ohl” laughed he, “je trouve toutes vos Anglaises 
superbes, magnifiques — quand elles ne son^ pas prudes.” 

“Et cela est un defaut que vous ne pouvez pardonner, 
h6, mon cher?” asked Sabretasche, with his low silvery 
laugh. 

“ Ni vous non plus ; mais la pruderie est une faute dont 
on ne peut jamais accuser la Trefusis.” 

Sabretasche laughed again, and quoted 

“Non, jamais tourterelle 
N’aima plus tendremeut. 

Comme elle 6tait fiddle 
A — son dernier amant!” 

De Vigne did not appear best pleased ; he lifted his head 
to look out of the window into the park, and as he looked 
his annoyance seemed to increase. I followed his glance, 
and saw the Trefusis on a very showy bay, of not first-rate 
action, taking her morning canter. 

“Ah, talk of an angel, you know I— there she is,” said 
Sabretasche. “Wise woman to show often en amazone; 
it suits her better than anything. She has met little Jimmy 
Levison, and taken him on with her. Poor Jimmy I between 
her smiles and old Fantyre’s honors he won’t come off the 
better for those Bruton Street soirees. Why, De Yigne, 
you look quite wrathful. You wouldn’t be jealous of little 
Jimmy, would you ?” 

I don’t suppose De Yigne was jealous of little Jimmy, 
but I dare say he was not flattered to see the same wiles 
given to trap that very young pigeon that were bestowed 
to lure a fiery hawk like himself. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


69 


“It amuses me to see all those women taking their morn- 
ing rides and walks,” Sabretasche continued. “ They love 
their darling horses so I and they do so delight in the 
morning air, and the green trees look so pleasant after the 
dusty pave 1 and they never hint that they know the 
Knightsbridge men will be looking out for them, and that 
Charlie will be accidentally lounging by the rails, and 
Johnnie be found reading the Morning Post under the 
large avenue. The Trefusis will tell us that she cannot 
exist without her morning trot on ‘dear Diamond,’ but, 
sans doute, she remembered that De Yigne would be pretty 
sure to be breakfasting by this window, not to mention that 
she had whispered to little Jimmy her wish to see his new 
gray hack. I always look under women’s words as I look 
under their veils ; they mean them to embellish, but I don’t 
choose they should hide at the same time.” 

“How do you act. Colonel,” laughed De Yigne, “when 
you come to a Shetland veil tied down very tight ?” 

“I never yet met one that hadn’t some holes,” said Sa- 
bretasche. “No women are long a puzzle, they are too 
inconsistent, and betray their artihces by overdoing them. 
She is out of sight now, De Yigne. Would you like your 
horse ordered'/” 

De Yigne laughed. 

“Thank you, no. Do you go to the new opera to-night, 
Sabretasche ?” 

“Yes. You know I never miss, though I should go 
with infinitely more pleasure if I could get the glories of 
Gluck and Mozart instead of the sing-song ballads of 
Yerdi and Balfe.” 

“ Music is the god of his idolatry,” said De Yigne, turn- 
ing to me. “It is positively one of his passions. Your 
heaven will be composed of sweet sounds, eh. Sabre- 
lATche ?” 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


TO 


“As yours of houris and of thorough-breds.” 

“ Perhaps. I should combine Mahomet’s and the Indian’s 
ideas into one — almond eyes and a good hunting-ground I’' 
laughed Granville. “ Look here, Arthur, at this Challenge. 
That man yonder did it. Isn’t he a clever fellow — too good 
to lie still in a rocking-chair and talk about women ?” 

I looked at the Challenge, a little marble statuette from 
Landseer’s picture, product of the Colonel’s chisel. It 
was a wonderful little thing ; every minutia, even each fine 
point of the delicate antlers, most beautifully and perfectly 
finished. 

“How immensely jolly I” said I, involuntarily expressing 
my honest admiration — “how intensely delightful, to pos- 
sess such a talent I What a resource it must be — what a 
refuge when other things pall I” 

He smiled at my enthusiasm, and raised his eyebrows. 

“Cui bono?” he said, softly, as he rose and pushed back 
his chair. 

The man interested me, and when he and the Baron 
were gone I asked De Yigne what he knew of him, as we 
stood waiting for his tilbury, to go and call in Bruton 
Street. 

“Of Vivian Sabretasche? I know much of him socially, 

little of himself; and of his history — if history he have 

nothing. He is excessively kind to me, honorable and 
generous in all his dealings, a gentleman always. More 
of him I know not, nor, were we acquainted ten years, 
should I at the end, I dare say, know more.” 

“ Why ?” 

“Why? For this reason, that nobody does. Hollings- 
worth and he were cornets together, yet Hollingsworth is 
as much a stranger to the real man as you or I. There 
are some men, you know, who don’t wear their hearts on 
their sleeves ; he is one, I am another. We are like snow « 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


71 


balls; to begin with, it’s a piece of snG.w, soft and pure 
and malleable, and easily enough melted ; but the snowball 
gets kicked about and mixed up with other snow, and 
knocked against stones and angles, and hurried and shoved 
and pushed along till, in sheer self-defense, it hardens itself 
into a solid, impenetrable, immovable block of ice.” 

“Nonsense I You are not that yet.” 

“Not yet.” 

I should say he was not. The passionate blood of five- 
and-twenty was more likely to be at boiling point than at 
zero. 


PART THE THIRD. 

I. 


now A SUBTLE POISON IS DRANK IN THE CHAMPAGNE AT 
AN OPERA SUPPER. 

Very good style was the Bruton Street house, and very 
good style (not my style, but that did not matter) was the 
Trefusis, sitting on a rose-hued couch, with the rose light 
of curtains of the same tint falling on her from the window, 
where she was surrounded by plants and birds in cages and 
on stands, with a young blonde-moustached boy out of the 
Guards, and a courtly white-haired old French exile 
lounging away their morning there. She was dressed in 
the extreme of fashion — almost too well, if ladies will 
admit such a thing to be possible — and she always re- 
minded me of some first-rate actresses at the Fran9ais or 
the Boulfes playing the roles of high-bred women, looking 
and speaking like ladies of the bes't society, and yet whom, 
^o what one will, and be they as graceful as they may, one 


72 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


cannot divest of a certain aroma, due rather, perhaps, to 
the proximity of the proscenium and foot-lights than to any 
fault of breeding in themselves ; yet a something which we 
know we should not discover in the true marquises and 
baronnes of the Faubourg. 

She looked up with a smile of conscious power, gave her 
hand tenderly to De Vigne with a full sweep of her superb 
eyes under their thick fringes, bent her head courteously to 
me, and put her Pomeranian dog on his knee. Old Lady 
Fantyre was there, playing propriety, if propriety could 
ever be persuaded to let herself be represented by that 
hook-nosed, disreputable, detestable, amusing old woman^ 
who sat working away at the tapestry-frame with her gold 
spectacles on, occasionally lifting up her little keen brown 
eyes and mingling in the conversation, telling the old tales 
of “ma jeunesse,” of the Bath and the Wells, of Ombre 
and Quadrille with Sheridan and Selwyn, of Talleyrand 
and Burke, “old Q.” and Lady Coventry. 

“ I remember you at Cambridge, Mr. Chevasney, and our 
merry luncheon,” said the Trefusis, as if Cambridge be- 
longed to some dim era of her childhood, which it was 
astonishing she could recall at all. 

“What I my dear,” burst in Lady Fantyre, “you don’t 
mean to say you remember all your acquaintances, do you? 
If so, ye’ll have enough to do.” 

“ Certainly not. But when they are as agreeable as Mr. 
Chevasney ” 

“Of course — of course — 9a va sans dire. Les pr^sens 
ont toujours raison,” continued the Viscountess, in her 
lively treble; “as true, by the way, that is, as its twin 
maxim, Les absens ont toujours tort. It would be hard, 
indeed, if we might not tell tales of our friends when they 
couldn’t hear us. But I know we used to give cuts by the 
dozen. I remember walking down the Birdcage Walk with 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


73 

Selwyn, (poor dear Selwyn, there isn’t his like in this day; 
I remember him so well, though I was but a little chit 
then I) and a man, a very personable man, too — but. Lord I 
my dear, not one of us — came up, and reminded George 
he had known him in Bath. What do you think Selwyn 
did, my dear? Why, stared him in the face, of course, 
and said, ‘Well, sir, in Bath I may possibly know you 
again,”’ 

“ That beats Brummel, when a lady apologized for keep- 
ing him so long standing by her carriage: ‘My dear lady, 
there is no one to see it,’” said De Vigne, laughing. 

“Abominable I” cried the Trefusis. “ If I had been that 
woman I would have told him I had made sure of that, or 
I would not have hazarded my reputation by being seen 
with him.” 

“Brummel would have been very willing to have been 
seen with i/oit,” said De Yigne, fixing his eyes on her, and 
he knows pretty well how to make his eyes talk, I assure 
you. 

“There’s not one of you men now-a,-days like Selwyn,” 
began the old raconteuse again, while the Trefusis bent her 
stately head to her blond Guardsman, and De Vigne bal- 
anced his cane thoughtfully on the Pomeranian’s nose. 
“You talk of your great wit Lord John Bouraot; why, he 
hasn’t as much wit in his whole body as there was in poor 
dear George’s little finger. Lord I how we laughed when 
Charles Fox aSked him if he’d been to see the execution of 
a criminal, you know, called by the same name, Charles 
Fox, who was hanged. ‘Not I,’ said George. ‘I make a 
point of never attending rehearsals.’ Ah ! there isn’t one- 
half the wit, the verve, the talent among you new people 
there were in my young time. Where is the man among 
you that can make laughter run down the table as my friend 
Sheridan could ? Which of you can move heads and hearts 

7 


VOL. I. 


74 


GEANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


like William Pitt ? Where among those idle lads in thb 
Temple, who smoke Cavendish and drink beer till they 
tJdnk nothing better than tobacco and beer, shall I see an- 
other Tom Erskine ? Poor dear Tom ! who was such a 
naughty boy till that girl took him in hand. Which among 
those brainless scribblers who print poems, and make one 
want a Tennyson’s Dictionary only to understand the fool- 
ish adjectives in them, can write like that boy Byron, with 
his handsome face and his wry foot ? Lord, what a fuss 
there was with him when he was first made a lion I And 
then to turn his coffin from the Abbey ! Such comic verses 
as he made on my parrot, too, he and young Hobhouse !” 

And old Fantyre, having fairly talked herself out of 
breath, at last halted, and De Vigne, annoyed first of all 
with little Jimmy in the morning, and secondly with the 
attention the Trefusis gave her blondin, neglected her for 
the Viscountess, with much parade. 

“ I fear you are right, madam,” he said, laughing. “ Ours 
is an age of general action rather than individual greatness. 
We have a good catalogue of ships, but no Ulysses, no 
Atrides, no Agamemnon ” 

“I don’t remember them: they wern’t in our set,” re- 
sponded Lady Fantyre, naively. 

“ Or perhaps,” continued De Vigne, stroking his mous- 
tache with laudable gravity, “it is rather that intellectual 
light is diffused so much more widely that the particular 
owners of it are not so much noticed. Arago may be as 
great a man as Galileo, but it is natural that a world that 
teaches the laws of gravitation in its twopenny schools 
scarcely regards him with the same wonder as if they 
believed in their earth’s movement, and were ready to burn 
him for his audacity.” 

“Ours is an age of science and of money,” said the old 
exile. “It is an age of machinery, tubular bridges, rail- 


GRANVILl.E DE VIQNE. 


75 


roads, telegraphs, whose principal aim is to economize 
labor and time ; an age in which everything is turned to 
full account, from dead algae to living brains; and what 
will not yield some grain for its own good, or the good of 
the community, is thrown aside as chaff, and cannot com- 
plain, for it is a universal law.” 

“Yes,” said De Yigne, “we are eminently practical; we 
extract the veratrin from crocuses, and value Brunei more 
than Bulwer. We throw our millions into a scheme for 
cutting through an isthmus, but we cannot spare our min- 
utes to listen to the music'of the spheres, though Pytha- 
goras were resuscitated to teach us them. So best I many 
more of us find it of much greater importance to get quickly 
to India than to wait for all the learning of the schools; 
and Adam Smith, though infinitely more prosaic, is proba- 
bly a much more useful philosopher than Bolingbroke.” 

“ Captain De Vigne, why don’t you stand for the county 
asked the Trefusis, playing with her breloques, and looking 
truly magnificent in her rose-velvet setting. 

“Because I’m before my time,” laughed De Yigne. “If 
I could have a select cabinet of esprits forts I should be 
delighted to join them, and help them to seminate liberty 
and tolerance; but really to settle Maynooth grants, to 
quarrel on rags or no rags, to settle whether we shall con- 
fine ourselves to ‘corks squared for rounding’ or admit 
rounded corks into the country] to hear one noble lord 
blackguard his noble friend opposite, and one hon. member 
split hairs with another hon. member — it would be beyond 
me, it would indeed. I would as soon go every night to 
an old ladies’ tea-fight, where bonnets were rancorously 
discussed and characters mercilessly blackened over Sou- 
chong and muffins.” 

“Come!” said the Trefusis, “you find such fault with 
your generation you should set to work and regenerate it 


T6 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Hunting with the Yiewaway, and lounging about drawing- 
rooms, will not do much toward improving your species.” 

“Why should I? As Sabretasche says, ‘Cui bono?^” 
answered De Yigne, annoyed at her sarcastic and noncha- 
lant tone. 

“Then you have certainly no business to sit at home at 
ease and laugh at other men over your claret and Cubas. 
Why may not other geniuses have equal right to that easy 
put off of yours, ‘Cui bono?’” 

“They have not equal right if they have once assumed 
to be geniuses. Let a man assert himself to be something, 
be it a great man or a scoundrel, and the world expects 
him to prove his assertion. But an innocent officer, who 
likes his claret and Cubas, troubles nobody, and never s<^ts 
up for a mute inglorious Milton, declining to sing only 
because his audience isn’t good enough for him, has a right 
to be left to his claret and Cubas, and not to be worried 
because it happens he is not what he never pretended 
to be.” 

The Trefusis looked at him maliciously; there was the 
devil in that woman’s eye. 

“And are you content to be lost in the bouquet of the 
wine, and buried in the smoke of the tobacco? Are you 
satisfied with spending your noble existence in an allegori- 
cal chaise-longue, picking out the motes and never remem- 
bering the beam ?” 

The tone was provoking in the extreme; it put up De 
Yigne’s blood, as the first touch of the snaffle does a young 
thorough-bred. He smiled, and stroked his long, silky 
moustaches. 

“That depends upon circumstances. When I have had 
my full swing of deviltries, extravagances, dissipations, 
pleasures, Trefusises, and other charming flowers that beset 
the path of youth, I may, perhaps, turn to something ” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


n 


It was an abominably rude speech; and though De 
Vigne spoke in the soft, courteous tone he used to all 
women, whether peeress or peasant, eighty or eighteen, it 
had its full effect- on the Trefusis. She flushed crimson, 
then turned pale, and I shouldn’t have cared to provoke 
the malignant glance those superb eyes shot upon him. 
She took no notice, and, turning to the little Guardsman, 
thanked him for a bouquet he had sent to her, and pointed 
it out to him, set in a console near. 

De Yigne drove the tilbury from the door supremely 
gloomy and silent. 

“I say, Arthur,” he said at last, “Victor Hugo says, 
somewhere, that we are women’s playthings, and women 
are the devil’s. I fancy Satan will get the worse of the 
bargain, don’t you?” 

“The deuce I do — that’s to say, if the war’s in words; 
though I must say you polished off the Trefusis neatly 
enough just now. Did you see the look she gave you?” 

“Yes,” said De Yigne, shortly. “However, anything’s 
better than a milk-and-water woman. I should grow sick 
of a girl who always agreed with me. They look so 
pretty when their blood’s up. Where shall we go now ? 
Suppose we turn into the Yard, and take a look at those 
steel grays Sabretasche mentioned ? I want a new pair to 
run tandem. And then we can take a turn or two round 
the Ring, and I’ll show you the women worth cultivating, 
young one.” 

We followed out his programme, bargained for the grays 
at a hundred and fifty — and immensely cheap, too, for they 
were three-parts thorough-bred, with beautiful action — 
drove half a dozen times round the Ring, where fifty pair 
of bright eyes gleamed softly on De Yigne, from the Mar- 
chioness of Turquoises in her stately barouche, to little 
Ooralie of Her Majesty’s ballet in her single horse brougham; 

7 * 


78 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


and then went to mess, where I made acquaintance with the 
rest of the fellows in the Dashers — capital fellows they 
were, too, and enjoyed good salmi and first-rate champagne ; 
the Dashers being as crack a troop as the Tenth, Eleventh, 
or the Blues, with a peculiar pattern for their plate, a chef 
for their cook, and a good claret connoisseur in their Col- 
onel. The claret was a vast lot better than Cambridge 
port, the dinner was something rather superior to hall, and 
the mess was a good deal greater fun than Moncton’s Joe 
Miller jokes, and Phil Hervey’s Simon the Cellarer, at our 
very best wines. I liked this soup9on of vie militaire, at 
any rate, and, upon my word, I quite regretted leaving the 
table when Sabretasche invited me to go with him to his 
box at the Opera, for I didn’t care two pins for music, but 
I did not dare to refuse the first favor from such an exclu- 
sive man, and, besides, I had seen little Coralie in the Ring, 
and consoled myself with the thought of the ballet. De 
Vigne was going too, for reasons best known to himself, 
and went to his stall, while I followed the Colonel to his 
box, in the middle of the second act. 

Sabretasche spoke not at all while Grisi was on the 
stage, and 1 put my lorgnon up and took a glance round 
the house. I always think Her Majesty’s, on a grand 
night, with all the boxes filled with the handsomest and 
best-dressed women in town, one of the prettiest sights 
going ; and I did the grand tier deliberately, going from 
loge to loge, so that it was some little time before I got on 
the second tier 5 and in one of its center boxes, looking 
like a very exquisite gipsy queen, in a scarlet opera cloak, 
with scarlet and gold in her raven hair, and scarlet camel- 
lias against her white lace dress, sat the Trefusis, with little 
bright-eyed, hooked-nosed, bewigged, and black Mechlin’d 
old Fantyre as a foil. 

Presently the irefusis raised her bouquet to her lipj 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB 


quite carelessly, to take its perfume, I presume. I hap- 
pened to look down at De Yigne : his lorgnon was fixed 
on her too. He smiled, left his stall, and in a minute or 
two I saw him displacing the blond Guardsman, and bend- 
ing down to the Trefusis. 

“What do you think of that affair, Chevasney?’’ said 
the Colonel to me, as the curtain came down. 

“ I don’t know enough how it stands to judge. En- 
lighten me, will you ?” 

Sabretasche shook bis bead. 

“ I know no more than yourself. De Yigne, like all 
wise men, is silent upon his own business, and I never 
Attempt to pry into it. I see the thing on its surface, and 
it seems to me that the lady is serious, whatever he be.” 

“ Serious ? Oh, hang itl he can’t be serious.” 

“Taut pis pour lui if he be,” said the Colonel, smiling. 

' But, my dear boy, you do not know women as yet ; how 
should you, in two-and-twenty years, read that enigmatical 
book, which is harder to guess at than Sanscrit or black 
letter ? And you can never fathom the deep game that a 
clever one like the Trefusis, if I mistake her not, can play 
when she chooses.” 

I, the most knowing hand in Granta — I, who if I did 
pique myself on any one thing, piqued myself on my skill 
and knowledge in managing the beau sexe — I, to be told 
I did not know women I I pocketed the affront as best I 
might, for I felt a growing respect and liking for the 
Colonel, with his myriad talents, his brilliant reputation, 
and mysterious reserve, and told him I did not believe De 
Yigne cared an atom more for the Trefusis than for twenty 
others before her. 

“I hope so,” he answered; “but that chess they are 
playing yonder ends too often in checkmate. However, wo 
will not prophesy so bad a fate for our friend, for worse be 


80 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


could not have than to fall into those soft-gloved hands. 
By the way, though, her hands are not soft, they are not 
the hands of a lady.” 

“You have a bad opinion of the Trefusis, Colonel?” 

“Not of the Trefusis in particular.” 

“ Of her sex, then 

“I have cause,” he answered, briefly. “How full the 
house is, and how few of those people come for music. 
How few of them would care if it were dance music of 
D’Albert’s, instead of Donizetti’s symphonies, if the dance 
music chanced to be most in fashion. Make it the rage, 
and three-quarters of the music lovers here would run 
after a barrel-organ ground on that stage, as they are now 
doing after Mario. Half England, if the Court, the Peer- 
age, and Belgravia voted the sun a bore, and a rushlight 
comme il faut, would instantly shut their shutters and burn 
rushlights while the fashion lasted. And then people care 
for the world’s opinion !” 

“ Because they can’t get on without it.” 

“ True enough ; they despise it, but they must bow to it 
before they can use it and turn it to their own ends — those 
must, at least, who live by sufferance on it and through it. 
Thank God, I want nothing from it, and can defy it at my 
leisure — or rather forget it and neglect it, defying is too 
much trouble. A man who defies is certain to raise a hue 
and cry to dog his heels, whose bray and clamor is as sense- 
less as it is deafening, and no more able to declare what 
bete noire it has come out after than Dogberry. Ah, you 
are studying that fair girl in the fifth from the center. That 
is little Eulalie Papillon. Does she not look a pretty, in- 
nocent dove ? Yet she will cost those three fellows with 
her more than a racing stud, and she is as avaricious as 
Harpagon. I should like to make a computation of how 
many of these people come for music. That old man there, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


81 


who droops his head and takes snuflf during the entr’actes ; 
those fellows on the ground tier taking shorthand nr>tes for 
the daily journals ; one or two dilettante ladies who really 
know something of fugues and symphonies, those are all, I 
verilj believe. Little Eulalie comes to show herself, and 
carry Bevan off to her petit souper, for fear any fairer Lais 
should pounce on him ; those decolletees and diamondized 
old ladies come because it is one of the Yards where their 
young fillies tell best, and may chance to get a bid. Lady 
Ormolu there, that one with marabouts in her hair, comes 
because her lord is a George Dandin, and she has no chance 
of meeting Yilliers, who is her present Cleante, anywhere 
else. Mrs. Lacquers, the owner of those very white teeth 
yonder — truly Howard’s one of the greatest benefactors to 
the beau sexe going — is here because there was a rumor 
that her husband’s bank would not stand, and he, who is a 
Bible society president and vessel of grace, but who still 
keeps one eye open on terrestrial affairs, has told her to 
exhibit here to-night, and be as lively as possible, with 
plenty of rubies about her, so that he may get off to 
Boulogne. Dear man I he remembers ‘Aide-toi et Dieu 
t’aidera.” 

“ Have you a private Belphegor in your pocket, sir 
said I, dropping my lorgnon, “ to help you unroof the 
houses and unlock your acquaintances’ brains ?” 

“My Belphegor is experience,” laughed Sabretasche. 
“And now hush, if you please, Chevasney; there is Grisi 
again, and as I come for music, though nobody else may, I 
like to be quiet.” 

It was curious to note the change that came over his 
melancholy, raffine, and expressive countenance, as, leaning 
forward, he listened to the priestess, and I saw the gaze of 
many women fixed upon him, as, with his eyes half closed, 
*nd his thoughts far away, he leaned against the side of his 

/ 


S2 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


box. They said he was deucedly dangerous to women, 
and one could hardly wonder if he was. A gallant soldier 
m the field, a charming companion in a club or mess-room, 
accomplished in music, painting, sculpture, as in the hardier 
arts of rifle and rod, speaking eight continental languages 
with equal facility, his manners exquisitely tender and gen- 
tle, his voice soft as the Italian he best loved to speak, his 
face and form of unusual beauty, and to back him, all that 
subtler art that is only acquired in the eleusiuia of the 
boudoir, — no marvel if women, his pet playthings, did go 
down before Vivian Sabretasche. He came of a family as 
poor as they were proud, and was born in Italy, where his 
father, having spent what money he had at the green tables, 
lived to retrench — retrenchment being always synonymous, 
in English minds, with the Continent, though whether a 
palace, even if a little tumble- down, ortolans, lachryma- 
christi, and nightly reunions, do tend to tighten purse- 
strings and benefit check-books, is an open question. 
Luckily for Sabretasche, his uncle, a rich old roue of the 
Alvanley and Pierrepoint time, went off the stage without 
an heir, and he, at three-and-twenty, came in for all the 
property, a princely balance at Barclay’s, a delicious town- 
house, and a moor up in Inverness-shire. On his acces- 
sion, he left the Neapolitan Hussars, entered the Queen’s, 
and took the position to which his old name and new 
wealth entitled him. It was always the popular idea that 
Sabretasche had some history or other, though why he 
should have nobody could probably have told you ; but 
everybody loved him, from the charger that followed him 
like a dog, and ate out of his hand, to the young Cornets 
who, in their larks and their difficulties, always found a 
lenient judge and a kind friend in gay, wealthy, liberal, 
highly-gifted, and ultra-fashionable Vivian Sabretasche. 

When he had drunk his fill of music, and I had clapped 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


33 


little Coralie to my hearths content — an ovation that young 
lady little needed, having a claque of her own in omnibus- 
boxes, not to mention some twenty men who threw her 
rare bouquets with veritable bracelets and bravissime — Sa- 
bretasche and I passing through the crush-room, or rather 
the draughty, catarrh-conferring passages that answer to 
that portion of Her Majesty’s now-a-days, came close to 
De Vigne with the Trefusis on his arm, bending his haughty 
head till his moustaches touched her gold and scarlet 
wreath, while the little blondin escorted Lady Fantyre, 
nowise enraptured, apparently, at the charge of that 
shrewd old dame, with her sandal-wood perfume and old 
lace of price and dirt untold. Tliey could not get on ; 
Lady Fantyre’s carriage was not yet up, and we stood and 
chatted together, the Trefusis smiling very graciously on 
us, but reserving all her most telling glances for De Vigne, 
on whose arm she hung with a sort of proprietorship, for 
which I cursed her with most unchristian earnestness. 

“ Come home to supper with us,” whispered the Tre- 
fusis, as their carriage was at last announced. 

De Vigne accepted the invitation with a flash of his 
eyes, which showed one well enough the Trefusis was be- 
ginning to play the deuce with him ; and old Fantyre ex- 
tended it to Sabretasche and to me. The Colonel smiled, 
and bowed his acquiescence, and, told his man to drive us 
to Bruton Street, as De Vigne sprang into the Fantyre 
Droughara. 

“I was engaged to what I like much better, lansquenet 
at Hollingsworth’s; but I want to see how the game lies 
ill Bruton Street. I fancy that woman’s moves will be 
worth watching,” said Sabretasche, throwing himself back 
on his cushions. “By the way, who is she — do yon 
know ?” 

“The devil I don’t I Somebody up at Cambridge said 


84 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Bhe was? old Fantyre’s companion, others whispered her 
daughter, others her niece, others, what the old woman 
said herself, that she is the child of her brother — a John, 
or James, or something monosyllabic, Trefusis.” 

“No very exalte lineage that,’’ returned Sabretasche; 
“for, if report be true — and I believe it is — the Fantyre 
at sixteen was an orange-girl, like the first Polly Peachem, 
crying, ‘ Who’ll buy ’em, two a penny I’ up Pall Mall ; that 
Fantyre, the most eccentric of eccentric Irishmen, (and all 
Hibernians have a touch of madness,) beheld her from his 
window in Arthur’s, fell in love with her foot and leg, 
walked out, offered to her on the pave, was accepted of 
course, and married her at seventy-five. What fools there 
are in the world, Chevasney I She pushed her way cleverly 
enough, though as to knowing all the exclusives she talks 
about, she no more knew them than my dog did. She 
heard of them, of course; saw some of the later ones at 
Ranelagh and the Wells; very likely won francs at piquet 
from poor Brummel when he was in decadence at Caen, to 
put him in mind of the palmy days when he fleeced Coombe 
of ponies ; possibly entertained Talleyrand, when the Bishop 
of Autun was glad of an English asylum; and, of course, 
v/ould get Moore, and Jeffreys, and Tom Erskine, and all 
the young fellows ; for a pretty woman, and a shrewd 
woman, can always make, men forget she sprang from the 
gutter : but as to the others — pooh ! she was no more inti- 
mate with them than I ; old Fantyre himself was in far too 
mauvaise odeur, and when he died at ninety-six, left his 
widow to live by her wits at the Bads, rather than to 
figure as a leader of ton. Here we are : it will all be very 
comme il faut and irreprochable — I bet you, Chevasney, 
Lady Fantyre is afraid of my eye-glass I” 

It was all comme il faut and irreprochable. De Vigno 
was sitting beside the Trefusis with his arm thrown over 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


,85 


the back of her chair, his glowing, passionate eyes fixed 
on hers with the vehement will and feeling that was char- 
acteristic of his fiery and concentrated nature ; while in the 
IVefusis’s face was merely the look of calm, conscious 
beauty, gratified at triumph and exigeant of homage — a 
beauty the embodiment of tyranny — a beauty that would 
exult in denying the passion it excited — a beauty only a 
tool in the hands of its possessor, to pioneer a path for her 
ambitions and draw within her reach the prizes that she 
coveted. 

De Yigne did not look best pleased to see us. I dare 
say he would have preferred a tete-a-tete supper, with old 
Lady Fantyre dozing after her champagne. Such, how- 
ever, was denied to him ; perhaps they knew how to manage 
him better than to make his game too easy. Do any of us 
care for the tame pheasants knocked over at our feet in a 
battue, as we do for an outlying deer that has led us many 
hours’ weary toil through burn and bracken, over rock and 
furze ? We knock down the pheasants to swell our triumph, 
and leave them where they fall, to be picked up after us ; but 
the difficulty and excitement of the other warm our blood 
and fire our pride, and we think no toil or trouble too great 
to hear the ping of the bullet and see the quarry pulled 
down at last. 

We had a very pleasant supper. Opera suppers are 
always pleasant to my mind ; there is a laisser aller about 
them, and that always gives a certain pointe a la sauce, 
which it would be better for ladies to put down among 
their items for a soiree a good deal oftener than they do. 

There was plenty of champagne, and, under its genial 
influences, the Fantyre tongue was loosened, and Sabre- 
tasche amused himself with the old lady’s shrewd wit and 
not over-particular stories — a queer contrast enough to the 
.ittle snuffy, rouged, and wigged Irish Peeress, with his 

8 


VOL. I. 


86 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


delicate beauty of feature, and singular refinement of mind 
and of tone; while De Yigne fired, not by the wine, for he 
had too strong a head, and, moreover, 1 doubt if he took 
quite so much as our hostess, but by the Parthian 'glances 
that had been so freely bestowed on him, and the proximity 
of that superb Trefusis, his idol — at least for the present — • 
talked with the spirit, and wit, and very soul of repartee, 
of which, when he chose, no man on earth could give out 
more brilliant corruscations. The Trefusis never said very 
much ; hers was chiefly silent warfare. 

“What did you think of the ballet. Colonel?” asked old 
Fantyre, peering up into his face. At seventy-six women 
are still much kinder to a handsome man than to a plain 
one. 

“I thought very little of it,” answered Sabretasche. 
“Coralie has no grace; boys make a fuss with her because 
she happens to be pretty, but as for her dancing — faugh I 
scores of Castilian girls I have seen doing the fandango 
under the village chestnut-trees would beat her hollow.” 

“Glorious dance that fandango is I” said De Yigne. 

“Those magnificent Spanish women (by the way. Miss 

Trefusis, a bet was laid at the United yesterday that you 
were. a Spaniard; Cheffontaine swore you ought to be a 
Proven 9 ale; and Sabretasche here said if you went to 
Naples they would claim you as a compatriote; see what 
it is to make all nations quarrel for you !) I have danced 
the fandango : no more able to help myself when the girl 
and the castanets began, than the holy cardinals, who, 
when they came to Madrid to excommunicate the cachu- 
cha, ended by joining in it. Like the rest of us, I suppose, 
they found forbidding a thing to other people very easy 
and pleasant, but going without it themselves rather more 
difficult.” 

“You never go without a thing you like, do you ?” asked 
the Trefusis. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


81 


^‘Certainly not. Why should I?’* 

“I don’t know; only boys who have reveled in Bath 
buns sometimes rue it when they realize chromate of 
lead.” 

‘‘Oh I as for that,” laughed De Yigne, “the moralists 
make out that a sort of chromate of lead follows, as natural 
sequence, any Bath buns one may fancy to eat. I don’t 
see it myself. I’ve eaten a good many buns, but they have 
had veritable sugar on them, and I have not been the worse ; 
and, even if I were, I question if the boy who lingers mis* 
erably at the pastrycook’s window, without the twopence 
that would enable him to go in and satisfy his longings, 
does not suffer quite as much in one way as his richer 
schoolfellow, who staggers home suffering under a reple- 
tion of tuck I” 

“ Only the worst of it is, that under repletion of tuck 
one loses one’s relish for it,” said Sabretasche. 

“Does one?” laughed De Yigne, emptying his wine- 
glass. “Ah, well, I am not at that stage just yet.” 

“Your best Bath buns are women. Captain De Yigne,” 
said Lady Fantyre, with her silent chuckle, “and you’ll be 
uncommonly lucky, my dear, if you don’t find some chro- 
mate of lead, as you call it, after one or two of them.'^ 

“He will, indeed,” smiled Sabretasche. “Ladies are 
the exact antipodes of olives : the one begins in salt, and 
leaves us blessed with a delicious rose aroma ; the other, 
with all due deference, is nectar to commence with, but 
how soon, through our fault entirely, of course, they turn 
into very gall !” 

Lady Fantyre chuckled again ; she was a wise old 
woman; in her way, and enjoyed nothing more than a hit 
at her own sex. To be sure, she was leaving the field 
very fast, and, perhaps, grudged the new combatants her 
cast-off weapons. 


88 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“True enough, Colonel; yet, if one may believe naughty 
stories, the flavor’s been one uncommonly to your taste.” 

Sabretasche shrugged his shoulders. 

“My dear lady, according to De Yigne’s theory, can one 
put aside the Falernian because there will be some amari 
aliquid at the bottom of the glass ? Nobody loved the 
beau sexe better than Mahomet, yet he learned enough 
from his favorite almond eyes to create his heaven without 
women !” 

“What a heathen you are, Sabretasche 1” cried De Yigne. 
“If I were Miss Trefusis, I wouldn’t speak to you I” 

“ My dear fellow, I could support it 1” said Sabretasche, 
naively, with such delicious Brummelian impudence that I 
believe Lady Fantyre could have kissed him — a favor for 
which the Colonel would have been anything but grateful. 

The Trefusis’s eyes glared ; De Yigne, sitting next her, 
did not catch their expression, or I think, though he might 
be getting mad about her, he would not have taken the 
trouble to look so tenderly at her, and whisper, “If he 
could bear it, 1 could not.” 

“Yes you could,” said the Trefusis, through her pearly 
teeth. “You would make me the occasion for an epigram 
on female caprice, and go and pay the same compliments 
to Lady Turquoise or Coralie the danseuse. I never knew 
the man who could not support, with most philosophic in- 
difference, the cruelty of one woman if he had another to 
turn to, provided she had not left him for some other man, 
when, perhaps, his pride might be a little piqued.” 

De Yigne smiled ; he was pleased to see her annoyed. 

“Well, we are philosophic in self-defense, probably; but 
you are mistaken in thinking so lightly of the wounds you 
give, and I am sorry you should be so, for you will oe 
more likely to refuse to what you fancy a mere scratch the 
healing touch that you might, perhaps, be persuaded to 


GRANVILLE £>E VIGNE. 


SS 

accord if you were more fully aware of the harm you nad 
done.” 

De Yigne’s eyes glowed darker, till he looked as if he 
really meant it, but Sabretasche interrupted him. 

“Talking of wounds, De Yigne ? My dear fellow, who 
gets them now ? This vanilla cream is excellent, Ijady Fan- 
tyre. Yanilla is a very favorite flavor of mine. The surest 
way of wounding, if such a thing be possible when the 
softest little ingenue wears a ehaiii-armor of practical ego- 
tism, is to keep invulnerable yourself. Miss Trefusis 
teaches us that.” 

“ Curse the fellow I” muttered De Yigne. 

lie liked Sabretasche cordially, but he could have kicked 
him at that moment with an intense degree of pleasure. 

“You know the world. Colonel,” smiled old Fantyre. 
“ I like men who do : they amuse one. When one^s been 
behind the scenes one’s self, those poor silly fools who sit in 
front of the stage, and believe in Talma’s strut and Sid- 
dons’s tears, in the rouge and the paint, and the tinsel and 
the trap-doors, do tire one so. You talk of your ingenues ; 
I’m sure they’re the most stupid lot possible.” 

“Except when they’re ingenues de Saint L6,” laughed 
De Yigne. 

“Which most of them are,” said the Fantyre. “Take 
my word for it, my dear, if you find a woman extra simple, 
sweet, and prudish, you will be no match for her. Sherry’s 
a very pleasant, light, innocent sort of wine, but strych- 
nine’s sometimes given in it, you know, for all that; and 
if a girl cast her eyes down more timidly than usual, you 
may be pretty sure those eyes have looked on queerer 
scenes than you fancy.” 

“To be sure,” said De Yigne. “I would a good deal 
sooner have to deal with an Ath^nais de Mortemar than 

8 * 


90 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


wit!\ a Francoise d’Aubigne. I should be on my guard 
against the wicked little Montespan, but I should be no 
match for Sainte Maintenon. ‘C’est trop contre un raari^ 
(or un araant) ‘d’etre coquette et devote: une femme de- 
vrait opter.’” 

“Then, when you marry, you will take your wife out of 
a guinguette rather than a convent ?” asked the old lady, 
with a comical smile. 

He smiled too, and stroked his moustaches. The Tre- 
fusis shot a keen, rapid, hard glance at him, as he said, 
“ Come, come. Lady Fantyre, is there no medium ?” 

“Between prudes and Aspasias ?” said her shrill little 
treble. “No, sir — not that I ever saw — and les extremes 
se touchent, you know.” 

“Hush! hush!” cried Sabretasche, “you will corrupt 
me. Lady Fantyre — positively you will — and you will make 
me think shockingly of all my kind, soft-voiced, soft-skinned 
friends.” 

“Somebody has made you think as badly of us as you 
can,” said the sharp old woman. “Not I. What do you 
think of that Moselle, Captain de Vigne?” 

He thought it good, but not so good as the Trefusis, 
who acted out the song, “Drink to me with thine eyes, 
love,” in a manner eminently calculated to intoxicate him 
jaore than all the wine ever pressed from Rhenish vine- 
yards. And when she took a little dainty cigarette between 
her ruby lips, and leant back on her favorite rose velvet 
couch, leaning her white arm upon it, so that its rounded 
lines might show, laughing at the Fantyre cancans, and 
flashing on De Yigne her brightest glances, even Sabre- 
tasche and I, who were set against her by that most 
dogged thing, a prejudice, could not deny that a finer 
woman had never worried a man’s peace of mind out of 
him, or sent him headlong into follies which close ever his 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


91 


head and shut out all chance of a fairer future or a wiser 
path. 

Come in and smoke a pipe, Arthur,” said De Vigne, 
when we had at length left the Fantyre petit souper, and 
Sabretasche had gone to his lansquenet at Hollingsworth’s. 
“’Tisn’t worth while going anywhere else to-night; it’s 
three now. I have some splendid Glenlivet, (how naturally 
one offers a Cantab something to drink I as naturally as 
to a cabman, I declare,) and I shall like a chat with you. 
Hallo 1 here’s my number. Confound it I why do they 
build town-houses all alike, that one can’t know one’s own 
by a particular mark, as the mother in the novels always 
knows her stolen child. Symmetry ? Oh 1 that’s like 
Sabretasche. One wants symmetry in a racer, I allow it, 
but in one’s lodging-house I could put up without it, rather 
than pull up Vivandi^re on her haunches twice for nothing, 
'Vhere’s my latch-key ? Confound the obstinacy of inani- 
mate objects; it beats the obstinacy of a theorist on modern 
ethics. Right on, up the stairs. I’ll follow you. By George ! 
who’s that smoking in my rooms? It can’t be Harris, be- 
cause I gave him leave to go to Cremorne, and not come 
home till morning, in time to fill my bath. It is tobacco, 
Arthur. What a devilish impertinence I” 

He pushed open the door. On De Yigne’s pet sofa, 
with Puck on his knees, a French novel in his hand, and 
a meerschaum in his lips, lay lazy, Sybaritish, girlish-look- 
ing, light-hearted “Little Curly.” 

“Curly!” cried De Vigne. “By Jove, how delighted I 
am 1 Little Curly I Where, in Heaven’s name, did you 
spring from, my boy?” 

“I sprang from nowhere,” responded Curly, taking his 
pipe out of his mouth. “I’ve given up gymnastics, they’re 
too tiring. I drove down in a cab that privately informed 
me it had just taken six cases of scarlet fever and three of 


S2 GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

smallpox to the hospitals, from Meurice’s, whither I arrived 
two hours ago, and where I had some hock that was am- 
brosia, but a chambermaid with red hair, fit to turn it all 
sour; and after digesting and recovering both of which, I 
thought I’d come and look after you. I found you were 
out — of course I knew you would be — and with the philos- 
ophy that always characterizes my slightest movements, 
took Le Brun, found out a pipe, (how well you brown 
yours, by the way,) and made myself jolly.” 

“Quite right,” responded De Yigne, who was a perfect 
Arab for hospitality. “Delighted to see you. We were 
mentioning you to-day, and wishing you were up here, 
were’nt we, Arthur? We’re quite a Frestonhills reunion. 
What a pity the Doctor is not here, and dear Arabella. 
Bat I say, Cnrly, have you got quit of Granta, like this 
disreputable fellow, or are you only run up on leave, or 
how is it ?” 

“Don’t you remember my degree was given me this 
year because I am a peer’s son ?” asked Curly, reprov- 
ingly. “See what it is to be a Goth without a classical 
education. You should have gone to Granta, De Yigne, 
you’d have been stroke of the Cambridge Eight, not a 
doubt of it. There’s muscle gone to waste I It’s very 
jolly, you see, being an Honorable, though I never knew 
it; one gets credit for brains whether one has them or not. 
What an inestimable blessing to some of the pillars of the 
aristocracy, isn’t it? I suppose the House of Lords was 
instituted on that principle, and its members are no more 
required to know why they pass their bills than we, their 
sons and heirs, are required to know why we pass our ex- 
aminations.” 

“And what are you going to do with yourself now?’* 
said De Yigne. “For the present you’ll keep on that sofa, 
and make yourself whisky-toddy ; but aprfes ?” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


93 


• “Aprfes? Well, the governor wanted me to go in for 
diplomacy, but I wasn’t up to it — lies are not my genre, 
they’re too much trouble ; so I demonstrated to him that 
it was clearly my mission to drink brandy, distract women, 
run into debt, curse parade, turn out on show days, move 
from Windsor to Knightsbridge, and back from Knights- 
bridge, and otherwise enjoy life, and swear at ennui with 
you fellows in the Queen’s. His mind was not open to it 
at first, but I soon improved his limited vision, and my 
name’s now down at the Horse Guards, where, after a little 
neat jobbery, I dare say the thing’ll soon be done.” 

“Is your governor manageable?” said I. 

Curly yawned, and opened his blue eyes a little wider. 

“Of course; I should cut him if be wasn’t. You see 
he’s a snob, (I wanted him to put on his carriage pauiiel 

Who’d have thought it? 

Cotton bought it! 

but he declined,) and my mother’s a Dorset; gave her 
title for his yellows. Now my brother Gus, poor devil I is 
the regular parvenu breed ; short, thick, red whiskers, snub 
nose, and all the rest of it, while I, as you see, gentlemen,” 
said Curly, glancing at himself with calm, complacent vanity, 
“am a remarkably good-looking fellow, eminently presenta- 
ble and creditable to my progenitors: a second Spurina, 
and a regular Dorset. Therefore, the governor hates Gus, 
(sneaky I consider it, as it is through his remarkable like- 
ness to him that Gus is fit to frighten his looking-glass,) 
but adores me, and lets me twist him round this little 
finger of mine, voyez-vous ?” 

Curly didn’t add that this twisting process was generally 
applied for the benefit of his ill-favored elder, for Curly, 
like many of those who are worth the most, delighted in 
representing himself as worth nothing. 


94 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


'‘And how’s Julia?” asked De Yigne. 

Curly looked as savage as he could look. 

“Julia? Confound her I how should I know? She’s 
been and hooked some old boy or other, I believe, poor 
devil I” 

“Who’s the poor devil?” laughed De Yigne; “the 
man for being caught, or you for being deserted ? Take 
comfort. Curly ; there never was a man jilted yet who 
didn’t return thanks for it twelve months after. When I 
was twenty, and went over to Canada for six weeks’ buffalo- 
hunting, I fell mad in love with a great Toronto beauty, a 
sheriff’s widow. Such ankles she had, and didn’t she show 
them just on the Ontario I It was really one of the most 
serious affairs I ever had, and she flirted a entrance, till she 
flirted me into a downright proposal. The most wide- 
awake man commits such betises when he is young. But 
who should come on the scene just then but a rich old fur- 
merchant, with no end of dollars, and a tremendous house 
at New York; and my little widow, thinking I v/as very 
young, and knowing nothing whatever of Yigne and its 
belongings, quietly threw me over, foreswore all the pretty 
things we’d said to one another in sledging and skating, 
and went to live at New York among the Broadway belles. 
I swore and suffered horribly; she turned the pampas into 
swamps, and absolutely made me utterly indifferent to 
bison. I lived on pipes and soda-water for a week, and 
recovered; but when I ran over to America last winter 
to see Egerton of the Rifles, I met in Quebec a dreadful 
woman, ten stone at the least, in a bright-green dress, with 
blue things in her hair and rubies for her jewels, her skin as 
yellow as gold, and as wrinkled as the Fantyre’s; and 1 
might have married that woman, with her shocking broad 
English, and her atrocious ‘ Do tell !’ What fervent thanks 
I returned for the fur-merchant’s creation and my own 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


95 


preservation I So will you, Curly, when, ten years hence, 
you happen to drop in at the Suoozeinrest Rectory, and 
find Julia as stiff as her brown paper- tracts, and as vinegar 
as the moral lessons she gives her parishioners, restricting 
her pastor and master to three glasses, and making your 
existence miserable at dessert by the entrance of four or 
five brats with shrill voices and monkey propensities, who 
make you look at them and their mother with a thrill of 
the deepest rapture, rejoicing that, thank Heaven, you are 
not a family man !” 

De Vigne spoke the truth. Why the deuce did not he 
remember that his passion for the Trefusis might be quite as 
utterly misplaced as his fancy for the Toronto widow, or 
the Cantab’s flirtation with Miss Julia? But, ah me! if 
the truth were always in our minds, or the future always 
plain before us, should we make the fifty false steps that 
the wisest man among us is certain to rue before half his 
sands are run ? If they knew that before night was down 
the sea foam would be whirling high, and the curlews 
screaming in human fear, and the gay little boat lying keel 
upward on the salt ocean surf, would the pleasure party 
set out so fearlessly in the morning sunshine, with cham- 
pagne flowing and bright eyes glancing, and joyous laugh- 
ter ringing over the golden sands and up to the flee*iy 
heavens ? 


II. 

WHAT WAS UNDER THE CARDS. 

That night, after we were gone, old Fantyre sat with 
her feet on the fender of her dressing-room, sans wig, teeth 
rouge, cosmetique, velvet, or lace; and an uncommonly 
hideous old woman she must have looked in that guissi I 


H 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


am certa-in, though, thank Heaven ! I cannot speak to the 
fact from ocular observation. The Trefusis sat there, too. 
looking all the handsomer for dishabille, in a cerise-hued 
peignoir and fur slippers, and her thick long raven hair 
unbraided, and hanging to her waist. 

“My dear,” began the Fantyre, “do you think you hold 
the trumps in that game you’re playing?” 

“ Certainly I do. Why?” 

“Because I’m not so sure. You’re playing fast and 
loose with De Yigne, and that don’t always succeeU. Brum- 
rael said to me, ‘ If we pique a woman, she is ours.’ That’s 
true enough with us, because we’re such fools ; nine times 
out of ten a woman don’t care a rush for a man who’s 
dying at her feet, while she’s crazy about some ugly brute 
who takes no more notice of her than he does of his dirty 
boots. Women love to go to heel, and they’ll crawl after 
a man who double-thongs them in preference to one who 
lets them rate him. Besides, we’re jealous; we hate one 
another like poison from our cradles, and if a man neglects 
us we fancy he likes somebody else, and of course, that’s 
quite enough to make us want to trap him away from her, 
whoever she be. But with men sometimes it’s a danger- 
ous game. They’re the most impatient creatures in crea- 
tion, and if one trout won’t rise to the fly, they go off and 
whip another stream. All fish are alike pretty well to 
’em, so that they fill their baskets. Men’s aim is pleasure, 
and if you don’t give it to ’em they will go somewhere else 
for it.” 

“True enough,” said the Trefusis; “but, at the same 
time, to a good many men difficulty is everything. Men 
of hot passion and strong will delight in pursuit, and soon 
grow tired of victory. They enjoy knocking the bird over; 
that done, it loses all interest for them. He Vigne is such 
a man; rouse his pride, you win him — yield easily, he loses 
his interest, and you miss him.’' 


.GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


9T 

Maybe, my dear — maybe. You know him better than 
I do, and must manage him as you choose. I dare say he 
does like climbing over spikes and chevaux-de-frise to get 
what he fancies ; he’s the stamp of creature that’s never 
happy out of excitement or danger, and Montaigne thinks 
like you: ‘Elies nous battent mieux en fnyant, comme les 
Scythes.’ How racy his old French is I I wish I had 
known that man ! I say, Constance, those two friends of 
his shouldn’t be with him too much, for they don’t like us. 
One’s that boy Chevasney.” 

“Boy, indeed!” echoed the Trefusis. 

“But De Vigne is fond of him?” 

“I believe so, but De Yigne is never influenced by any- 
body.” 

“I hope he may not be, except by you, and that won’t 
be to his advantage, poor fellow I He’s a very handsome 
pigeon, my dear — a very handsome one indeed !” chuckled 
the old lady. “But the other one is more dangerous than 
Chevasney; I mean that beautiful creature — what’s his 
name? — Vivian Sabretasche. He don’t think much about 
us, I dare say, but he don’t like us. He sees through us, 
my dear, and, ten to one, he’ll put De Vigne on his guard.” 

“De Vigne listens to nobody who comes between him 
and his passion of the moment ; and how is it possible that 
Sabretasche should see through us, as you term it ?” 

“Not all our hand, my dear, but one or two cards. That 
cairn nonchalant way of his conceals a wonderful deal of 
keen observation — too keen for us. Vivian Sabretasche 
is very witty and very careless, and the world tells very 
light stories of him ; but he’s a man that not Satan him- 
self could deceive.” 

“ Well, nobody wants to deceive him.” 

“ Don’t you want to marry his friend ?” 

“Enough of that. Lady Fautyre. I will neither be lec- 
voL. I. 9 g 


98 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE.. 


tured or schooled. You agreed to help me, but you agreed, 
too, to let me succeed in my own way. I tell you, I know 
how to manage him, and that before this year is out, in 
spite of Chevasney, Sabretavsche, or anybody — yes, in spite 
of himself — I shall be Granville de Yigne’s wife.” 

“I wish you may, my dear,” said the Fantyre, with 
another chuckle. " Well, don’t talk to me any more, child. 
Get Le Bruu, will you, and read me to sleep.” 


III. 

A DOUBLED -DOWN PAGE IN THE COLONEL’S BOOK OP LIFE. 

What a pace one lives at through the season I and, 
when one is fresh to it, before one knows that its pleasant, 
frothy, syllabub surface is only a cover to intrigues, petty 
spites, jealousies, partisanships, manoeuvres — alike in St. 
Stephen’s as at Almack’s; among uncompromising pa- 
triots as among poor foreigners farming private banks 
round about St. James’s Street; among portly aristocratic 
mothers, trotting out their innocent daughters to the mar- 
ket, as among the gauze-winged, tinseled, hard-worked 
deities of the coulisses — how agreeable it is 1 Illusion in 
one’s first season lasts, I think, about the space of one 
month. With its blissful bandeau over our eyes, we really 
do admire the belles of the Ring and the Ride ; we go to 
balls to dance, and to dinners for society ; we swallow larks 
for ortolans, and Cremorne gooseberry for Clicquot’s; we 
believe in the innocent demoiselles, who look so naive, and 
such sweet English rosebuds at morning fetes, and do not 
dream those glossy braids cover empty but world-shrewd 
little heads, ever plotting how to eclipse dearest Cecilia or 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


99 


win old Ilauton’s coronet; we accept their mammas invi- 
tations, and think how kindly they are given, not knowing 
that we are only asked because we bring Shako of the 
Guards with us, who is our bosom chum, and has fifteen 
thousand a year, and that. Shako fairly hooked, we, being 
a younger son, shall be gently dropped. We go to the 
Lords and Commons, and believe A. when he says he has 
the deepest admiration for his noble friend B., whom he 
hates like poison, and reverence D. when he pleads for the 
liberty of “the people,” whom over his claret he classifies 
as “beastly snobs.” We regard the coulisses with delight, 
as a temple whose eleusinia it is high honor to penetrate, 
and fall veritably in love with all those fair nymphs flutter- 
ing their spirit veils at Willis’s, or clanking their spurs as 
Mazurka maidens. That delightful state of faith lasts 
about a month, then we discard the bandeau, and use an 
eye-glass instead; learn to confine ourselves to “Not bad- 
looking” before the handsomest Galatea in the Park ; find 
out that dinners are a gathering to consume hock and tur- 
bot, but not by any means bound to furnish society; pro- 
nounce balls a bore, and grow critical of Moet’s ; are 
careful of the English rosebuds, knowing that, kept out of 
view, those innocent petals have thorns, which they know 
well how to thrust out and dextrously impale us on them ; 
we take mammas’ invitations at their worth, and watch the 
dragon’s teeth opening for that luckless Shako, with grim 
terror of a similar fate ; we laugh over rum-punch with a 
chum of ours, a whip in the Commons, who lets us into a 
thing or two concerning the grandiose jobbery of Down 
ing Street, and finds out that coulisses atmosphere, however 
agreeable, is no exclusive boon; that its sesame is a 
bracelet to the first dancer, who, though she may take a 
Duke’s brougham, is not insensible to even a Cornet’s trib- 
ute if IX come from Hunt and Roskill, and we give less 


100 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


lovb and more Cremorne lobster-salad to the Willis and 
Mazurka maidens. 

Such, at least, was my case ; and when I was fairly in 
the saddle and off at a pace, like a Doncaster favorite’s, 
through my first season, enjoyed it considerably, even when 
the bandeau was off my eyes, which, thanks to De Yigne 
and Sabretasche, took place very speedily. 

Of De Yigne I did not see so much as if no Trefusis had 
been in being, for he was constantly after her, going with 
her to morning concerts, or Richmond luncheons; riding 
with her in the Park ; lending her a horse too, by the way, 
for that showy bay of hers had come out of Bruton Mews, 
and no livery-stable mount is fit for any mortal, much less 
a female; attending her everywhere, but not as yet “com- 
promising” himself, as, according to the peculiar code of 
honor in such cases, we may give a girl a bracelet with im- 
punity to ourselves, but are lost if we hazard a diamond 
circlet for her “third finger.” That comes rather hard on 
those poor women, by the way, for Lovelace may talk, and 
look, and make love in every possible style, yet, if he stops 
short of the “ essential question,” Lovelace may go scot 
free. We shall remark what a devil of a girl it is to flirt, 
and her sworn allies, who have expressed sympathy to her 
in crossed notes of the fondest pathos, agree among them- 
selves “How conceited poor Laura is to fancy Lovelace 
could be serious I Why, dear, all that means nothing; 
only Laura, poor thing I has had so little attention, she 
doesn’t know what it is. If she had had a man mad about 
her, as you and I have had, love — ah I do you remember 
poor Frank Cavendish at the race ball?” Whereon the 
sworn allies scent their vinaigrettes, indulging pleasurable 
recollections, and Lovelace burns Laura’s lock of hair that 
he asked for under the limes in the moonlight; thinks 
“How deucedly near I was! must be more careful next 


1 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. lOi 

time,” and wonders what sort of girls he shall find al 
Brighton. 

De Vigne, however, as long as he would not come well 
up to hand, received no such flirting kindnesses from the 
Trefusis, not even so much as a note to thank him for his 
concert tickets, or a flower from the very bouquet he had 
gent her. Perhaps she knew by clairvoyance that her 
Cambridge azalea had gone ignominiously into the grate, 
for she tried on that style no more, but was coy and re- 
served, as if Hannah More had been her chaperone in- 
stead of bad old Sarah Lady Fantyre. That worried, 
excited, and roused De Yigne, and I saw, without needing 
much penetration, that he was drinking deeper and deeper 
of a stimulant which he never refused when it was fairly to 
his lips, and which brings worse follies, and wilder deeds, 
and more resistless delirium to men than lie in tbe hottest 
draught of Falernian, or a thousand grains of opium. Sa- 
bretasche and I used to swear at the power of the Trefusis, 
and lament De Yigne’s infatuation together, but we could 
do nothing to weaken either: opposition to a man in love 
is like oil to fire. 

Sabretasche was remarkably kind to me ; he introduced 
me in his set, one of the most intellectual, exclusive, and 
rafline in town ; he admitted me to his charming dinners, a 
sort of Plato’s banquets, where modern Pausaniases and 
Aristophanes met to discuss witty topics over choice cook- 
ery; and he let me into his studio, the most luxurious 
miniature art palace possible, where, when enioloyed on his 
marble or his canvas — and no amateur skill was his either 
I — no one was ever allowed to disturb him. His house was 
not large; he avowed a mortal dislike to a wilderness of a 
/*welling with enormous rooms and draughty galleries, but 
it was in exquisite taste. Noiseless footmen moved about 

9 * 


]s2 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


it in subdued liveries ; the library was full of every provo- 
cation to literary gormandism; the drawing-rooms were of 
classic elegance, for he suffered no upholsterer to overload 
and overgild his rooms; the smoking-room was of epicu- 
rean comfort; the conservatories were full of every flower 
out of the Flora of every nation, I verily believe ; and, 
finally, his “own room” was the essence of all the others, 
with flowers, pictures, busts, books, statuettes, a grand 
piano, and every style of lonnging-chair, and opened out 
of his beloved studio, only divided from it by a massive 
curtain of green, bordered with gold. Yes, decidedly, Sa- 
bretasche knew to perfection the great art, “ IIow to live.” 
and he had every facility for enjoying life — riches, refined 
taste, art, intellect, hundreds of men who sought him, scores 
of women who courted him, a facile wit, a sweet temper — 
yet, somehow or other, you could trace in him a certain 
shadow, often dissipated, it is true, in the sunshine of his 
gay words and the music of his laugh, but certain to creep 
over him again an intangible shade of disappointment. 
Perhaps he had exhausted life too early ; perhaps his ex- 
cessive refinement was jarred by the very pleasures he 
sought; perhaps the intellectual and classic mould of his 
mind was not, after all, satisfied with the sedatives he gave 
it, though he devoted as many hours to his studio and 
library as to the boudoir and the card-room ; however, as 
for speculating on Sabretasche, all town pretty well did 
that, more or less, but nobody in town was ever any the 
wiser for it. One morning I was going to breakfast with 
him; his nominal breakfast-hour was noon, though I 
believe he often rose very much earlier, took a cup of 
coffee a la Balzac, and chipped, or read, or painted in his 
studio. I took my way across the Gardens to Sabre- 
tasche’s house, which was at the Marble-arch end v)f Park 
Lane, taking that detour for motives of my own. Gwen- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


103 


dolina Brandling, Curly’s eldest sister, an exquisite nymph 
of eighteen, with crepe hair, had confided to me the pre- 
vious day, over strawberry-ice, at a fete at Twickenham, 
that she was in the habit of accompanying her smaller sis- 
ters in their morning walk with their governess, to “put 
her in mind of the country,” and the Hon. Gwen being a 
fresh, honest-hearted, and exceedingly nice-looking girl, I 
took my way through the Gardens about eleven, looking 
out for Curly’s sister among the pretty nursemaids, ugly 
children, and abominable, ankle-breaking, dress-tearing 
perambulators, that filled the walks. There was no Hon. 
Gwendolina at present, and I threw myself down under 
one of the trees, put my eye-glass in my eye, and took out 
that day’s Punch, to while away the time till Gwen and 
her cameriste might come in sight. I was reading those 
delicious “ Snob Papers,” by that superb master of social 
satire, that cordial hater of frauds and follies, that genial 
lover of all that might he so noble, true, and earnest in 
human nature, whom it cuts me to the heart to think should 
ever so far consult the milk-and-water bias of the day as 
to tell us in the “Cornhill” (by-the-by, why that title? is 
it, by way of chaff, to intimate to us that we are to find 
tares instead of rich ripe wheat ?) that he will always re- 
member that “the ladies and children are at the table,” 
forgetting that the time when the children come to dessert 
is the hour of abomination to everybody, and that it is 
when the ladies are gone and the claret goes round that 
the talk grows wise and witty, that graver questions are 
discussed, and stories worth hearing told. Oh, Lion I you 
love strong meat yourself; give it to those who reverence 
yon, and catch at any crumbs that fall from your table. 

I was immersed in those delicious cuts at snobbisra, 
when an angry voice fell on my ear, speaking rapidly in 
Italian. I knew Italian well, a Neapolitan governess 


104 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


having brought me up while I was in petticoats, and the 
words fell distinctly on my ear. 

“Come, signor, why waste time about it? You know 
that your secret is worth more than I ask. You know 
you would give half your riches to make sure it would 
never be known by anybody, to efface it altogether, eh, ex- 
cellenza ? Come 1 I ask a very low price ; not worth 
jangling about ; no more to you than a few scudi to me. 
Why waste time ? You know I can bring her over in 
twenty-four hours, and then ” 

“ Take it, and begone 1” 

Ye gods I that last voice, cold, contemptuous, with a 
thorough-bred ring in it, though full of concentrated dis- 
gust and wrath, I recognized as Vivian Sabretasche’s. In- 
voluntarily I turned to look. Yes, it was he ; our v.^yer- 
exclusive, over-refined Sabretasche; the most fastiaious 
and the proudest man in town, in company with a shabbily 
though showily-dressed fellow, with rings on his fingeru and 
an imperial on his chin, and a handsome, vulgar, insolent 
face, that wore at that minute as abominably avaricious 
and insulting a smile as ever was seen, as the Colonel 
shoved a roll of bank-notes into his hand, a passi m of 
loathing and impatience quivering over his delicate fea- 
tures. The man laughed a laugh as impudent as his 
smile. 

“Thank you, signor, a thousand thanks. I won’t trou- 
ble you again till — I’m again in difficulties. ” 

Sabretasche gave him no answer, but turning his back 
upon the man, folded his arms upon his chest, and walked 
away across the Gardens, with his head bent down, while 
the fellow counted the notes with glistening, triumphant 
eyes, crushed them up as if he loved their crisp new rustle, 
stroked his beard, whistled an air from “Figaro,” and 
strolled on toward the gate, leaving me in a state of the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


106 


profoundest amazement at the vulgar acquaintance the 
fastidious Colonel had selected, and the secret by which 
this under-bred foreigner seemed able to hold in check so 
profound a man of the world as Sabretasche. 

Just at this minute, Gwendolina and her duenna ap- 
peared in the distance, and I, dropping my eye-glass, went 
to meet them, lifted my hat with a surprised smile of pleas- 
ure, and talked of Grisi and Mario, of Balfe’s new song, 
and Sims Reeves’s last concert, with the hundred topics 
current in the season, while the little ones ran about, and 
the French governess chatted and laughed, and Gwen 
smiled and looked like a sunbeam, and told me about her 
ponies and dogs and flowers down in Hampshire. Poor 
Gwen I She is Madame la Duchesse de Yieillecour now, 
not over happy, I fear, despite the diamonds I saw flash- 
ing on her brow and neck last night at the Tuileries; in 
the gorgeous glories of her Champs Elysees hotel, in the 
light beauty of her summer villa at Enghien, in the gloomy 
state and magnificence of her chateau in the Cote d’Or, 
whose massive iron gates close like a death-knell, does 
she ever think, I wonder, of those spring mornings in the 
Gardens when she was in her spring-time too ? 

It was just twelve when I reached the Colonel’s house. 
I was shown straight to his own room ; and there he lay 
on one of the couches, calm, cool, imperturbable as ever, 
not a trace visible of his past excitement and irritation, 
very unlike a man with a secret hanging over his head and 
darkening his life. He stretched out his hand with a kind 
smile. 

“Well, Arthur. Good morning to you. You are just 
in time for the match. Du Loo has not been here five 
minutes.” 

Du Loo was a heavy, good-humored, stupid fellow in the 
Blues, who prided himself on his fine teeth and his boxing, 


106 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and who was going, at half-past twelve, to have a little 
play with Fighting Chatney, one of the Fancy, who let 
himself out to beat gentlemen, in order that gentlemen 
might learn to heal 

On the carpet at Sabretasche’s feet lay a great retriever, 
the one thing in the whole world for which he cared, chiefly, 
I believe, because it had trusted itself to his kindness. 

“Poor old Cid !” said he, pausing in his breakfast to set 
the dog down some larded guinea-fowl. “I spoil him for 
sport, you say? Perhaps; but I don’t want him for sport, 
and I make his life comfortable. I see, in him, one thing 
in this Via Dolorosa that is perfectly content and happy; 
and it is a treat to see it. He was a stray pup that fol- 
lowed me all the way from Woolwich to Kensington. I 
did not notice him at the time, but when I awoke the next 
morning he had rolled himself up in a ball on my bed, and 
was rubbing his nose against my cheek. That is two years 
ago. Cid and I have been fast friends ever since, and we 
love one another, don’t we, old boy ?” 

The Cid looked up at him with two honest, tender 
brown eyes, and wagged his tail. Sabretasche had talked 
to him till, I believe, the dog understood him quite as well 
as I did. 

“There are lots of women. Colonel,” said Du Loo, 
“who’d bid high for the words you throw away on that 
dog.” 

“Possibly. But are any of them as faithful, and honest, 
and worthy, as ray Cid? The Cid would like broken bones 
and a barn with me as well as French cookery and velvet 
cushions. I’m sorry I couldn’t say as much for your fair 
ladies, Du Loo.” 

“The devil! no,” yawned the Guardsman. “Catch a 
woman giving up her opera-box and her milliner I Why, 
the other night I saw Nelly Lacquers, the British Beggars’ 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. lOt 

JJank man’s wife, got up no end at the Silverton Drum, 
laughing and talking, waltzing, and carrying pearls worth 
two thousand; and, by George! if there isn’t a warrant 
out against her husband this morning for swindling! 
Mustn’t she be a horrid, heartless little bit of flippery ?” 

“It doesn’t follow,” said Sabretasche. “Most likely 
he sent her there to disarm suspicion, while he sent off his 
specie to France or America, and got his passport to 
Calais. I never judge people: seemingly bad actions may 
have good motives, good ones may spring from base and 
selfish ends. ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ When will 
tlie world take that gentle injunction to heart ? Never ! 
It loves to quote ‘An eye for an eye,’ ‘Salvation is far 
from the wicked,’ and ‘Depart from me, ye accursed;’ but 
it is singularly oblivious of the ‘Mote and the beam,’ of 
‘From your hearts forgive every one his trespasses,’ and 
‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at 
her.’ If a man breaks his leg, he thinks it a ‘sad accident,’ 
a ‘great affliction;’ if he sees his friend break his, he has 
no hesitation in pronouncing it ‘a judgment.’” 

Du Loo stared at him. 

“What the deuce. Colonel, are you turning sermon- 
izer f” 

“No, my dear fellow, I have enough conscience still left 
not to preach before practicing; though truly, if that were 
a rule, few of our pulpits would be filled. But I have one 
virtue — tolerance ; therefore I may preach that. How can 
we presume to pronounce verdicts on each other when we 
know so little of the inner life, the real motives, actions, 
or position of men with whom one is in daily intercourse ? 
Vices there are, of course, on which law and public feeling 
must execute justice for the preservation of any comfort or 
any virtue; but even there, surely, if one ‘hate the sin,’ one 
may ‘love the sinner;’ and we have a great deal too much 


108 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to do — looking at home — to have either leisure or right to 
carp at others, much less to condemn them. There is your 
friend, Fighting Chatney. Now for your seventh heaven, 
Du Loo.” 

‘‘And yours too, Sabretasche ?” 

“No. I learnt to hold the belt; of course I should bo 
sorry for another man to be able to beat me in any game ; 
but there is a degree of absurdity in two mortals setting 
solemnly to work to pommel one another ; there is something 
unpoetic, and coarse, and savage, about blood and bruises, 
and, besides, it is so much exertion. However, go at it ; 
it is for Arthur’s delectation, and I can go into my studio 
if I am tired.” 

Du Loo and his pet of the fancy retired to the far end 
of the room, and there set-to, delivering from the left 
shoulder, and drinking as much beer between their rounds 
as a couple of draymen. As the match had been arranged 
for my express pleasure, of course I watched it with the 
deepest interest, though Sabretasche’s remarks gave the 
noble art a certain degree of ludicrousness, mingled with 
the admiration with which I had been accustomed to re- 
gard such “little mills.” Du Loo finally floored the bruiser, 
to his own extreme glorification, while the pet very gener- 
ously growled out to him that he might be as great a man 
as the Tipton Slasher, if he would train himself properly. 
Du Loo left, and Sabretasche asked me to stay ten minutes 
to let him finish a picture which he had been amusing him- 
self by taking of me in crayons — a portrait, by tjie way, 
which is a far better one than any I have ever had done by 
R. A.’s, and which my mother still cherishes devotedly at 
Longholme. 

“What a strange fellow Du Loo is,” said the Colonel, 
“or, rather, what a commonplace one I The man’s great- 
est delight is a Moulsey mill, and his ambitions are locked 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


109 


ap in the brutalities of the Ring. Of any higher world — 
of the world of imagination and ideal, of affections and 
aspirations — he is utterly ignorant. Talk to him of the 
intellectual thirst of the more refined charms, which we, 
who are lovers of art and genius, feel and enjoy, you might 
as well discourse to him in Hebrew. Take him out under 
the summer stars, make him listen to the silvery chimes of 
the night, place him amid the deep and holy silence of 
nature, he would look bored, yawn, and ask for his cigar. 
Positively, Arthur, he makes one feel one’s link to the 
animals mortifyingly close. In truth, the distance between 
the zoophytes and man is not wider than the great gulf 
between a Goethe and a prize-fighter, is it ? It is propor- 
tion of brain which makes the master superior to his dog; 
why should not different proportion of brain make as dis- 
tinct a mark between the clod of the valley and the cultured 
scholar or poet? Truly, men are born stamped by nature 
helots and masters, and the master will assert his supremacy, 
whether the “coal from the altar” be laid on his lips from 
the ingle-nook of a cottage or the censer of a palace. But 
why am I talking all this to you ? You have more amusing 
occupation than to listen to my fancies. Turn a little 
nearer the light. That is it I Have you seen De Vigne 
to-day ?” 

“No; he was gone to Albert Smith’s with the Trefiisis 
and Fantyre, confound them I Do you think she will 
win. Colonel ?” 

“My dear boy, how can I tell? I think she will if she 
can. ‘Donne gentile devote d’amorc ’ generally manage to 
marry a man if they have full play with him. If De Tigne 
only saw her in morning calls when his head was cool, and 
others were with him, possibly he might keep out of it; 
but she waltzes with him — she waltzes remarkably well, 
too — she shoots Parthian glances at him in the tete-Ateto 

10 


VOL. I. 


110 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


of conservatories, after the mess champagne ; moreover, 
ten to one, in some of those soft moments, he will say 
more than, being a man of honor, he can unsay.” 

And be cursed for life.” 

“Possibly. Love does that for a good many, and on 
the baseless fantasy of early eye-love many men .have sur- 
rendered their entire lives to one who has made them a 
blank ! Troublesome eyes yours are, Arthur. I can’t make 
out their color. What present will you give Mrs. De 
Vigne on her wedding-day ?” 

“Confound her, none!” I shouted. “He’s a vast deal 
too good for fifty such as she — a cold, calculating, ambi- 
tious, loveless woman ” 

“One would think you were in love with her yourself, 
Chevasney. Let me catch that terrific expression, it would 
do for a Jupiter Tonans.” 

“ And she is so wretchedly clever !” I groaned. 

“ In artifice ! yes ; by education I no. Her knowledge 
is utterly superficial. I cannot imagine where she has 
lived. She speaks shockingly ungrammatical French, with 
a most atrocious English accent; she neither plays nor 
sings. We were speaking of Granvella the other day; she 
fancied him a poet. We referred to Mont Thabor; she 
did not know who had fought there. A'et she waltzes, 
rides, and dresses splendidly, and has a shrewd, sharp sar- 
casm, which passes muster as wit among her admirers. 
In fact, she is a paradox ; and I shall regret nothing more 
than to see De Vigne misled out of his right senses by her 
magnificent beauty, stooping to tie himself for life to a 
woman with whom he will have nothing in common — w'ho 
will have neither feeling to satisfy his heart nor mind to 
6atisfy his intellect, and with whom I would bet great odds 
a week after the honeymoon he will be disgusted.” '' 

“ Can’t you persuade him ?” I began. He stopped me 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


in, 

.with an expressive gesture ; he had much of the Italian 
gesticulation. 

“Persuade?” Mon gar9on, if you want to force a man 
into any marriage, persuade him against it. Tell a man 
not to fall in love, and he will fall in love straightway. No 
one should touch love affairs. Third persons are certain 
to barbotter the whole thing. The more undesirable the 
connection, and the more you interfere, the more surely 
will the ‘ subject ’ grow obstinate as a mule under your 
treatment. Call a person names to anybody over whom 
she has cast a glamour, and if he have anything of the gen- 
tleman or the lover in him, out of sheer amour propre, and 
a sort of wrong-headed, right-hearted chivalry, he will 
swear to you she is an angel.” 

“And believe it, perhaps.” 

“ Most likely, until she is his wife I There is a peculiar 
magic in that gold circlet, badge of servitude for life, which 
changes the sweetest, gentlest, tenderest fiancee into the 
stififest of domestic tyrants. Don’t you know that, before 
marriage, a lady Moves to see gentlemen smoke, it is so 
manly;’ and, after it, ‘never allows that filthy tobacco in 
her house.’ Don’t you know that, when she’s engaged to 
him, she is so pretty and pleasant with his men friends, 
passes over the naughty stories she hears of him from 
‘well-intentioned’ advisers, and pats the new mare that is 
to be entered for the Chester Cup ; twelve months after the 
quarry is lured, his chums have the cold shoulder and the 
worst wine ; she gives him fifty curtain orations on his dis- 
graceful conduct with his cousin Julia, whom he ventured 
to take to one* morning concert, while madame was in bed 
reading French novels. And as for racing — he daren’t 
mention it in her presence ; hides his BelVs Life as a 
schoolboy hides Tristram Shandy, and wonders if the peevish 
woman who comes down an hour too late for breakfast can 


112 


QAANVILLB DE VIGNE. 


by any possibility be identical with the smiling bien coiflFee 
young lady who poured his coffee out for him with such 
dainty fingers and pleasant words when he stayed down at 
her papa’s for the shooting.” 

I laughed. “Don’t ever get married yourself, Colonel, 
for the sake of Heaven, women, and consistency I” 

He smiled too, as he answered : 

“ ‘A young man married is a man that’s marred.^ That’s 
a golden rule, Arthur ; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, 
I have not a doubt, suggested it. Experience is the best 
asbestos, only, unluckily, one seldom gets it before it is too 
late to use it, and one’s hands are burned irrevocably. 
Shakspeare took to wife the ignorant, rosy-cheeked, War- 
wickshire peasant girl, at eighteen! Poor fellow ! I pic- 
ture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like new- 
born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great 
germ of unspoken poetry within him tinging all the common 
realities of life with a rose hue ; the lion genius that was 
stirring in his heart giving him power to see with the 
God-like vision that is only given to the few ; the fairies 
nestling in the cowslip chalices, and the golden gleam ol 
Cleopatra’s sails, to feel the ‘ spiced Indian air’ by night 
and the wild working of kings’ ambitious lust ; knowing, 
by the divine intuition of the creative force, alike the soft 
low chimes of nature unheard by common ears, and the 
fierce schemes and passions of a world from which social 
position shut him out I see him in his hot imaginative 
youth finding his first love in the yeoman’s daughter at 
Shottery, strolling with her by the Avon, making her an 
‘ odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds,’ and dressing her 
up in the fond array of a boy’s poetic imaginings. Then — 
when he had married her, he, with the passionate ideals of 
Juliets and Violas, Ophelias and Hermiones in his brain 
and heart, must have awoke and found that the voices so 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


M3 


eweet to him were dumb to her. The ‘cinque spotted 
cowslip-bells’ brought only thoughts of wine to her ; when 
he was watching ‘certain stars shoot madly from their 
spheres/ she most likely was grumbling at him for mooning 
there after curfew-bell ; when he was learning Nature’s 
lore in ‘the fresii cup of the crimson rose,’ she was dinning 
in his ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks ; 
when he was listening in fancy to the sea-maid’s song, and 
feeling in his brain grow larger, clearer, fonder, the im- 
aginings to which a world long ages after still stands 
reverentially to listen, she was buzzing behind him and 
bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her 
girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, 
instead of idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakspearo. Poor 
fellow I I can picture him in his vehement youth and his 
regretful manhood. He did not write, without fellow- 
feeling and .yearning over souls similarly shipwrecked, that 
wise saw ‘A young man married is a man that’s marred !’ 
My dear Arthur, I beg your pardon. I am keeping you 
a most unconscionable time, but really your eyes are very 
troublesome. I say, some men are coming here for lans- 
quenet to-night, will you come too ? and do bring De 
Vigne if you can. One sees nothing of him now, and 
there are few so well worth seeing. What a wicked fellow 
I am, ladies would say, to lead you into high play. I can’t 
think it myself ; you would be led into it without me, and 
I see no more harm in high play than in making ducks and 
drakes of one’s money after racers, pictures, subsoilings, 
model cottages, or any other hobby ; and it has this advant- 
age, that if one loses, one loses to one’s friends. Besides, 
lansquenet "ouses one a little; and what a blessing that is I 
Au revoir, mon cher. I have an immense deal of work be- 
fore me. I am going to the Yard to bid for Steel Patter- 
son’s cream filly ; then to the Twelfth’s mess luncheon ; 

10 * h 


lU 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


next 1 have an appointment to meet the Godolphin — all 
town’s talking of that fair lady, so I reveal no secret ; and 
apres, I must dress to dine in Eaton Square, and I much 
question if any of them are worth the exertion they will 
cost me, except, indeed, the cream filly I” 

Wherewith the Colonel dismissed me. As I saw him 
that night, when De Yigne and I went there for the prom- 
ised lansquenet, courteous, urbane, gay, nonchalant, witty, 
I saw no trace of any mysterious secret, nor any lingering 
touch of the haughty anger and impatient disgust he had 
shown to his singular companion of the morning. But, 
then, no more did I see, what all the world said they saw, 
that Vivian Sabretasche was a heartless libertine, an un- 
principled gambler, an egotist, a skeptic, a sinner of the 
deepest dye, to be condemned immeasurably in boudoir 
scandals and bishops’ dinners, and only to be courted, and 
visited, and have his crimes passed over because he was 
rich and was the fashion. 


PART THE FOURTH. 

I. 


THE LITTLE QUEEN OP THE FAIRIES. 

“Arthur, who do you think has gone to the dogs 
through that rascally British Beggars’ Bank ?” said Dfr 
Yigne one afternoon, unharnessing himself after one of the 
greatest bores in life, a field-day in Hyde Park, and talking 
from his bedroom to me, as I sat drinking sherry and Selt 
zer before going into my rooms in the barracks. 

“ How should I know, out of half a million,” I responded 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


115 


*What an awfully warm day I Thank Heaven, tnere’L’ 
Boon be an end of the season !” 

“Do you remember old Tressillian, of Weive Hurst r” 

“Of course. The devil! you don’t mean him?” 

“I am sorry to say I do ; he has lost every penny. To 
think of that scoundrel, Sir John Lacquers, flinging Bible 
texts at your head, thrusting his charities into your face 
going to church every Sunday as regularly as a verger 
and to morning prayers on a week-day, building bis alms 
houses and attending his ragged-schools, and now he’s cu-: 
off to Boulogne, with a neat surplus, I’ll be bound, hidde: 
up somewhere ; and widows, and children, and ruined gen 
tlemen will reap the harvest he has sown ! Bah ! it makep 
one sick of humanity I” 

“And is Tressillian one of his victims?” 

“ I believe you I I saw his name on the list some day • 
ago, and on Monday, as I was riding out by Apsley House 
corner at a trot. Tally-ho saw fit to knock down a little 
girl, or, rather, I to let him ; I ought to have been looking 
where I was going, instead of staring through my glass 
after the women in their barouehes. There was an old 
gentleman with her, who picked her up, not hurt, but 
pretty considerably frightened ; she was a pretty little 
thing, and didn’t cry naturally. I got off to apologize, 
and, to my surprise, recognized Boughton Tressillian. 
The little girl was the child that used to be at Weive 
Hurst — daughter — no, granddaughter, wasn’t she ?” 

“Little Alma. Yes. We used to say she’d be a pretty 
woman. Well, go on.” 

“I was very pleased to see him. You know I always 
liked him exceedingly. I asked him where he was living ; 
he said, with a smile, ‘In lodgings in Surrey Street; you 
know I can’t afford Mauri gy’s now.’ And I called on him 
there yesterday ; such a detestable lodging-house, Arthur 1 


116 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


Brummagem furniture and Irish maids I He is just the 
same simple, courtly, old grand seigneur as ever. I’m not 
a susceptible man, as you know, nor a sentimental, but, I 
give you my honor, it cut me to the heart to see that 
gallant old fellow, whom we last knew down at Freston- 
hills as proud a country gentleman as any round, utterly 
beggared through that psalm-singing, pharisaical swindler, 
and bearing his reverses like the plucky French noblesse 
that my father used to shelter at Yigne after ’98, and of 
whom my mother used to tell me tales, to show me, as she 
said, that a gentleman was a gentleman always, whatever 
his externals, while his honor was safe and his name un- 
tarnished.” 

“And has he nothing now ?” 

“Nothing. His entire principal was placed in Lac- 
quers’s hands. Weive Hurst is gone to pay his creditors, 
and one can do nothing to aid him, he is so deucedly — no, 
not deucedly, but so rightly proud. Come with me to-day 
and see him ; we shall drive there in ten minutes, and we 
must be doubly attentive to him now. There will be just 
time between this and mess if you ring and tell them to 
bring the tilbury round.” 

The tilbury soon came round, and the new steel grays 
tandem, (to the imminent danger of everybody’s life that 
happened to be in the streets while they paced through 
them, though De Yigne was a magnificent whip, and hig 
having run over Alma Tressillian did make him, for a 
wonder, rather mindful of the existence of applewomen 
and cabs,) soon set us down in Surrey Street. 

One of the Irish maids that so excited De Yigne’s dis- 
gust showed us up stairs. Mr. Tressillian was not at home, 
but was expected in every minute ; and we sat down to 
wait for him. Through the windows, on those dismal leads 
that admit to the denizens of Surrey Street a view of the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


117 


murky Thames and steam transports of the Cockneys, the 
little girl was standing, who, as soon as she caught sight 
of De Yigne, ran into the room and welcomed him with 
exceeding warmth and an acces of color that might havp 
flattered him much had she been a few years older. 

She was about ten or eleven, an awkward and angular 
age ; but she had neither angles nor awkwardness, and 
was as pretty as they ever are in their growing time, with 
hair of that glistening burnished gold, bright in shade aSf 
in sunshine, and deep blue eyes, brilliant and dark under 
her black silken lashes, which promised, in due time, to do 
a good deal of damage. In her little dainty Paris-made 
drei B of soft white muslin and floating blue ribbons, the 
chi. ^ looked ill fitted for the gloomy atmosphere of Surrey 
Stieet. Poor little thing I a few weeks before she had been 
the heiress of Weive Hurst, now, thanks to that godly 
creature, Sir John Lacquers, her future promised to be a 
st ruggle almost for daily bread. 

“ I am so glad you are come I” she exclaimed, running 
up to De Vigne. “Grandpapa will be so pleased to see 
you, and you will do him good. When he is alone he 
grows so sad, and I can do nothing to help him. I am no, 
companion for him, and if I try to amuse him — if I sing to 
him, or talk, or draw — I think it only makes him worse : 
he remembers Weive Hurst still morel” 

“Do you not^ miss Weive Hurst, Alma?” asked Do 
Vigne. 

The child’s eyes filled with tears, and the blood rushed 
over her face. 

“i/m Weive Hurst I Oh, you do not guess how much, 
or you would not ask me I My beautiful, darling Weive 
Hurst, with its grand waving trees, and its bright flowers, 
and its sweet sunshine 1 Miss Weive Hurst I In thit# 
cold, dark, smoky place, where I never see the sun, or hear 


118 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the bir'ds, or feel the summer wind ! Miss Weive Ilurst ! 
Where overy flower knew me, and let me kiss it when 
it opened its eyes to the morning sun I Miss Weive 
Hurst I ” 

And the little lady stopped in her vehement oration, 
and sobbed as if her heart would break. 

^‘What an excitable little thing I’’ said He Vigne, rais- 
ing his eyebrows; then he bent gently toward her, as cour- 
teously as if she had been the Duchess of Turquoises. “I 
beg your pardon, Alma; I am sorry if I vexed you. I 
could not know how much you loved your home; and 
perhaps — who knows? — you will go back to it again 
some day.” 

She raised her head eagerly. 

“Ah ! if I could hope that !” 

“Well, we will hope it I” smiled De Yigne. “Some of 
those flowers that love you so much will tell the fairies that 
sleep in their buds to come and fetch you back because 
they want to see their little queen.” 

She looked at him half in surprise. 

“Ah I you believe in fairies, then? I love you for 
, that.” 

“ Thank you. Do you, then ?” 

“ Of course,” said Alma, with the reproving tone of a 
believer in sacred creed to a heathenish skeptic. “ Shak- 
speare did, you know. He writes of Ari^l and Puck, Peas- 
blossom and Cobweb, who ‘pluck the wings from painted 
butterflies,’ and ‘kill cankers in the musk rose-buds.’ Mil- 
ton, too, believed in Fairy Mab and the Goblin, whose 
‘shadowy flail had thrashed the corn that ten day-laborers 
could not end.’ Flowers would not be half flowers to me 
without their fairies, and, besides,” continued Miss Alma, 
with the decision of a person who clinches an argument, 
“1 have seen them, tool” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


il9 


Indeed!” said De Yigne. “But so have 1.” 

“ Where ?” asked Alma, breathless as a dilettante to 
whom one breathes tidings of a lost Corregio. 

“ There !” said De Vigne, lifting her up in his iron grasp 
before the high mirror on the mantle-piece. 

She laughed, but turned upon him with injured indigna- 
tion. 

“ What a shame ! You do not believe in them one bit — 
not the least more than grandpapa. I will not love you 
now — no, never again I” 

“My dear child,” laughed De Vigne, “even your sex 
donT love and unlove quite in such a hurry. Don’t you 
care for your grandpapa, then, because he has never seen 
fairies ?” 

“ Care for grandpapa I 0 yes I” she cried, passionately, 
“as much as I hate — oh, hate ! — those wretched, cruel men 
who have robbed him of his money. I would try not to 
care for Weive Hurst if he were happy, but he will never 
be happy without it any more than I. ” 

“Do you remember me, Alma?” I asked, to change her 
thoughts. 

She shook her head. 

“Do you remember him ?” 

She looked very tenderly and admiringly on De Yigne. 

“Oh yes! When I read ‘Sintram,’ I thought of him as 
Sir Folko.” 

De Yigne laughed. 

“You bit of a child, what do you understand of ‘Sin- 
tram ?’” 

“ I understand Sir Folko, and I wish I had been Ger- 
trude.” 

“Then you wish you had been my wife, mademoiselle?” 

Alma considered gravely for a moment, looking steadilj 
In De Yigne’s face : 


120 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Yes, I think I should like you to take care of me as 
he took care of Gertrude.’’ 

We went off into shouts of laughter, which Alma could 
not understand. She could not see she had said anything 
laughable. 

“ I thought you were never going to love me again, 
Alma? A wife ought to love her husband,” said I)e 
Yigne. 

Alma made a moue mutine and turned away, her blue 
ribbons and her gold hair fluttering impatient defiance. 
Just then her grandfather came in, the stately, silver- 
haired, gentle-toned master of Weive Hurst. 

“How do you do? cried He Yigne. “I am having an 
offer made me, Mr. Tressillian, though it is not leap year. 
I hope you will give your consent?” 

“I will never marry anybody who does not believe in 
fairies,” interrupted Alma, running back again to her 
leads. 

“If she make a like proposal five or six years hence to 
any man, she’ll hardly have it neglected,” said I, when 
Tressillian had recalled who I was, and shaken hands with 
me. 

Tressillian smiled sadly. “ Her love will be a curse to 
her, poor child, for she will love too well; as for her being 
neglected, she will not have the gilding necessary to make 
youth protected, beauty appreciated, or talent go down, if 
she should chance to have the two latter as she grows up.” 

“ Which she is pretty sure to have, unless she alter dread- 
fully,” said De Yigne. 

Boughton Tressillian sighed. “ Yes, she is pretty enough, 
and she is clever. I have educated her entirely, and I be- 
lieve she already knows much more than young ladies who 
have just ‘finished.’ She would learn even better still if 
she were not so wildly imaginative. Poverina I she is ill 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


121 


fitted to grapple with the world. I never guessed but what 
her life would be one of affluence and luxury, or I would 
never have united her fortunes to mine. Whether I spend 
my few more years between four bare walls or not, matters 

little; but hers . Well, De Yigne, what news to-day? 

Is the Liberal ministry going to keep in or not?’’ 

De Vigne stayed some lialf hour chatting with him, tell- 
ing him all the amusing on dits of the clubs, all the joros 
and cons of the new Reform Bill, and all the fresh politi- 
cal tittle-tattle of the morning, while Tressillian, after that 
single expression of regret for Alma, alluded no more to 
his own affairs, and discussed politics, literature, and all 
the current topics with the intelligence and interest of a 
man of intellect, entertaining us with the same cheerful 
ease as he had done at Weive Hurst, evidently meeting his 
reverses with a philosophy of the highest yet of the sim- 
plest order; and that true pride which knew that it was 
he himself, not his mere entourages or social position, 
which rendered him worthy to be sought and respected. 
De Vigne was more courtly, more delicate, more respectful 
to the ruined gentleman than he was to many a leader of 
high ton, for, haughty and imperious on occasion as he was, 
there was a touch of true chivalry in his character. Go 
down in the world, De Vigne stretched out his band to 
you, be you what you might; rise high, and he cut you, or 
snubbed you, as he might see fit. De Vigne was not like 
the world, messieurs. 

'‘How I should enjoy straightening my left arm for the 
benefit of that cursed hypocrite of the British Beggars^ 
Bank,” began De Vigne, tooling the tilbury back again 
through the Strand; and, so far forgetting himself in his 
irritation as to venture to use the whip to his wheeler, 
who revenged the insult by a pas d’extase, which pro- 
duced the most frightful commotion among the omnibuses 

11 


VOL. I. 


122 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


full of City men, whose conductors swore in most inelegant 
language at “the confounded break-neck nob I” “The 
morality of the age is too ridiculous ! On a poor banker’s 
clerk, who, with a sick wife and starving children, yields to 
one of the fiercest temptations that can beset a man, and 
takes one drop out of the sea of gold around him, it cru.she8 
BO severely, and seems to think penal servitude too kind a 
boon for him I To a lying pharisee, who has reduced forty 
thousand people, who trusted in his honor, to want or utter 
ruin, who has taken alike the poor curate’s hard savings 
and the landed gentleman’s large principal, the world is 
lenient, because be stuck his name on missionary lists, and 
came to public meetings with the Bible on his lip^, and, 
after a little time has slipped away, men will see him in- 
stalled in a Roman palace, or a Paris hotel, and will flock 
to his soirees by the dozens !” 

“Of course; don’t you think that if Mephistopheles set 
up here in Belgravia, and gave the best dinners in London, 
he would find lots of people to dine with him ?” 

“ Sans doute. Men measure you by what you give them. 
If you’re a poor devil with only small beer in your cellar, 
you are ostracized, though you be the best and wisest man 
in Athens ; if you can give them claret, they will come and 
drink it with you, and only discuss your sins behind your 
back ; and if by any chance you should have pipefuls of 
Johannisberg, and Tokay, and priceless Madeira, you will 
have all the cardinal virtues voted to you without your 
giving a single testimony to your even recognizing the 
cardinal virtues at all. The world is very fond of taking 
a scapegoat whom it flogs, as his governess flogged a 
peasant boy for the dauphin’s sins; and that scapegoat 
they will, in their periodical fits of morality, as Macaulay 
has it, hunt down, and torture, and trample to death, with 
every inconceivable ingenuity. But, take my word for it, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


123 


that scapegoat is always some ruined man, or some boy- 
poet goaded on by cruelty or starvation, or some woman 
such as she to whom the founder of their creed was con- 
tent to say, ‘ Go and sin no more;’ never by any chance the 
sinner whose phylacteries are broad and horn exalted, and 
at whose groaning table they may still eat, and drink, and 
be merry. Hallo I gently, gently. Psyche I what a hard 
mouth she has. Confound her I she will set Cupid off 
again, and I shall figure in the police reports as taken up 
for furious driving. I say, what can Tressillian do ?” 

“ Do I repeated. 

“Yes. What can he do that I can find him? He is a 
gentleman and a scholar, but his age shuts him out from 
any post such as he could ever accept. He has no money 
— he must do something; indeed, it is his deepest wish. I 
must talk to Sabretasche ; he has no end of interest every- 
where if he would only exert it. I think he would if I 
asked him, so that we might get some pleasant gentleman- 
like sinecure for Tressillian, where he would not have much 
to remind him painfully of his reverses. I’ll see. My family 
can get most things for asking, the distaff side at the least ; 
there are no De Vignes on the face of the earth besides 
myself ; one scapegrace is enough, I suppose. By the way, 
Chevasney, you’ll try and get leave to come down with me 
on the 1st to Yigne. It’s a horrid bore, but I can’t get 
mine till the 31st. I wanted it a month earlier.” 

“To go to Brighton?” I knew the last week in July 
would see the Fantyre and Trefusis transplanted from 
Bruton Street to Kemp Town. 

He laughed. “ Well, Brighton’s very pleasant in its 
season, and town is utterly detestable in August, when 
everyoody not tied by the leg as we are is away yachting 
in the Levant, or fishing in Norway, or bagging black 
game on ibe moors, or doing something worth doing. 


124 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


However, we must make up for it among the turnips and 
stubble. I think my preserves are the best in the country; 
but I never will have a battue. Cooping up tame pheas- 
ants, who come around you as if they were going to be fed, 
and calling it sport to shoot ^era off by the score at a yard 
or tw^o’s distance, is too ridiculous. A boy used to a pop- 
gun could do as much as that. You must come down, 
Arthur, I can’t do without you ; it’s a crying cruelty to 
coop military men up in the shooting season ; besides, you 
are a great pet of my mother’s.” 

“Doesn’t she ever come to town ?” 

“Oh, yes; but her health is delicate. She has no 
daughters to bring out, you know, and I think she prefers 
the country in the spring and summer. Here one loses 
summer altogether. We don’t know such a word; it is 
merged into ‘the season,’ and the flowers seem to grow on 
ladies’ bonnets instead of meadow land. Well I I like it 
best. I prefer society to solitude. St. Simon Stylites had 
very fine meditations, I dare say, and a magnificent bird’s- 
eye view of the country, but I must say Aristippus’s myrtle 
wreaths and Falernian would seem more like life to me, 
and I fancy I should see more of human nature in the Pre 
Catalan than the prairies.” 

“Yet you go mad after nature sometimes.” 

“Of course. There is a simplicity of grandeur about 
the wide stretch of sea in a sunny dawn, or the far sweep 
of gray hills and golden birch woods in a Highland moor, 
beside which the fret and flippery, the toil and turmoil of 
human life, shrink back rebuked into insignificance. No 
man who has any manhood left in him at all but feels the 
better for the fresh rush of mountain wind and the calm 
solitude of midnight stars. But for all that, I am neither 
poet nor philosopher enough to live with nature always, 
and forswear the coarser elements of life, lansquenet, rac- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


125 


ing, Coralies, champagne, and all one’s other habitual 
agremens. Hang it, Arthur, why do you set me defining ; 
can’t you let me enjoy ? When a man begins to define his 
love, it’s a sign he’s getting tired of it, and wants to reason 
himself back into it ; and when he begins to define life, to 
divide it into animal and spiritual, and philosophize upon 
it, it is ten to one he’s grown sick of the whole thing, oi 
some way or other missed the right key to amusing himsell 
in it. Ten years hence I will theorize on life as much as 
you please, just now I prefer taking it as it comes, passing 
the flavorless flowers, and sucking all the honey out of the 
roses and mignonette. There 1 we did the distance in no 
time. Remind me to speak to the messmen about that 
would-be ’15 port. It is the most daring sloes-and-dam- 
sons that was ever palmed off on anybody. Thank Heaven 
nobody can deceive me in wine.” 

“Nor in anything else ?” 

“ I hope not. If they can, I have not knocked about 
the world to much purpose.” 

If De Vigne set his mind on doing anything, whether 
it was taking a bullfinch or winning a woman, hooking a 
salmon or canvassing a county, he never rested till it was 
done ; therefore, having taken Boughton Tressillian’s cause 
steadily to heart, he set all the levers going that were avail- 
able to find something suitable to the old man’s broken 
fortunes and refined taste. With his head and heart full 
of the Trefusis, and his time more than filled up with his 
favorite pursuits and amusements, I thought it was very 
good of him to think to such useful purpose for a man who 
had known little of him since his boyhood, and to give so 
much time as he did to calling and soliciting and letter- 
writing in the old gentleman’s cause. He never let Sabre- 
tasche alone till the Colonel, who knew everybody, from 
royal princes and cabinet ministers downward, used hia 

11 * 


126 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


interest too, a thing Sabretasche detested doing, because, 
as he said, it “gives you so much trouble, and lays you 
under obligation, a debt nobody ever allows you to forget 
that you owe them.” To please De Yigne, however, the 
Colonel exerted himself, and between them they procured 
a consulate for Tressillian at a large pleasant town on the 
Mediterranean shore, which had of late years become 
almost an English settlement, whose climate was exquisite, 
scenery perfect, combined with admirable English and 
Italian society, according to the elegant language of the 
guide-books, who told no lies about it for a wonder ; guide- 
books, perhaps from a feeling of generosity, generally mak- 
ing it a point of honor to praise what nobody cares two 
straws for, and omit the one thing that is worth a journey 
to inspect, and about which you are certain to be beset with 
questions from everybody on your return home. 

Anybody who wanted to see the side of De Yigne’s 
character that made those who really knew him love him 
with the love of Jonathan for David, (a character as un- 
known to the generality of people as David’s was to those 
who only judged him when his passions were up and he 
slew Uriah, and snatched away Bathsheba, and did many 
other naughty things,) should have seen him offering his 
consulship to Tressillian, with the most delicate tact and 
refinement of feeling, so that the ruined gentleman could 
feel no obligation that could touch his pride, and could re- 
ceive it only as a thoughtful forestalling of his wishes. 
That Tressillian felt it deeply I could see, but De Yigne 
refused all thanks. 

“What had he done V he persisted. “Nothing at all. 
Asked his cousin for a thing, to which Ferrers was only 
enchanted to be able to appoint a gentleman of birth and 
classical education ; if any was obliged it was Ferrers, and 
he himself was only delighted to be the first to offer to 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNK 


12: 


Tressillian anything Tressillian would honor them all by 
accepting. ” 

Tressillian shook his head ; he felt the kindness all the 
deeper for De Vigne’s disclaimer of it. “You are a noble 
fellow, De Yigne ; you will find your reward some day.” 

“My dear sir,” laughed De Vigne — when he felt things 
at all he generally turned them oflf in a jest — “ I get many 
more rewards than I deserve, I fancy; my life’s all prizes 
and no blanks, except now and then the blank of satiety. 
I am not one of those who ‘do good and blush to find it 
known,’ for these simple reasons, that I never do any good 
at all, and have not blushed since I was seven and fell in 
love with my mother’s lady’s-maid, a most divine French- 
woman, with gold ear-rings, who eventually took up with 
the butler — bad taste, after me, was it not? You won’t 
desert me for anybody I hope, Alma? You will see sub- 
lime Italians at Lorave ?” 

“ They will not be as handsome as you are. Sir Folko,’^ 
responded Miss Tressillian, with frank admiration. 

“Thank you, cher enfant; you will teach me to blush if 
you flatter me so much. Will you take me in, Alma, if I 
and my yacht call upon you any time ?” 

“Oh, do I do 1” cried Alma, vehemently, “and take me 
on the sea, and I will show you the mermaids under the 
waves, with their necklets of sea-shells and their fans of 
pink weed. You will see then?, indeed you will, if you will 
only believe in them.” 

“ Most apt illustration of faith,” laughed De Yigne. 
“People see tables turn, and violins dance with broom- 
sticks, and hear Shakspeare talk through a loo-table, by 
•sheer force of believing in them. When will that child 
ever learn to come down to the coarse realities of actual 
every-day existence ?” 

“No,” said Tressillian, “I am afraid 1 have hardly taken 


128 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the best way of educating her for the real world. She 
should have gone to school, to learn the sober practicali- 
ties, and business tendencies, and methodical views of Eng- 
lish schoolgirls. Her solitary life, with books and flowers, 
has encouraged the enthusiasm, imagination, and demon- 
strativeness, that come, I suppose, with her foreign blood ; 
but then, I always thought she would be raised above heed- 
ing or considering the world, much more above ever work- 
ing in it. Now that I shall not have the time to devote to 
her, I must find some one who will.” 

A few days afterward, Tressillian, with his granddaughter 
and an English governess he had engaged for her, set off for 
Lorave. De Vigne and I saw them off at the South-Eastern 
station, and little Alma cried as bitterly at parting with De 
Vigne as almost any woman who loved him could have done, 
only the tears were not got up for effect, and washed off 
no rouge as most of theirs would have done. De Vigne 
kissed h^r — she was pretty enough to win such condescen- 
sion; it took something very pretty to tempt De Vigne ; 
he was too great an angler to count all fish that came in his 
net — consoled her with the promise of a yachting trip to 
Loravft, and came away from the station to drive the Tre- 
fusis down to dinner at the Star and Garter, where he was 
going to give an entertainment of unusual extravagance 
and splendor even for that dashing hotel, of which Con- 
stance Trefusis was undisputed regina, and looked it too, 
drinking Badminton with much the same air as Juno must 
have worn drinking ambrosia, and outshining all the women 
in beauty, and figure, and toilette, for which last the women 
of course hated her, and respected her a la fois ; for, cor- 
dially as a lady detests a handsome sister, it is notable that 
she no less despises a plain or ugly one. To be handsome 
a woman thinks an unpardonable crime in her rival, and to 
be plain is a most contemptible faux pas. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


129 


I can see De Yigne now, sitting at the head of the table, 
that bright June evening, at Richmond. How happy he 
looked I his broad, white forehead slightly flushed with 
pleasure and triumph, his dark eagle eyes flashing fire, or 
beaming softness and tenderness on the Trefusis, his firm 
lips curved into a joyous smile, his musical and singularly 
clear-toned voice ringing with a careless, happy harmony. 
Dear old fellow 1 Life’s best gifts seemed to lurk for him 
in that goblet of champagne he lifted to his lips, with a 
fond pledge (by the eyes) to Constance. Yet, if he had 
known, he would have filled the glass with hemlock rather 
than have coupled the champagne cup with her name. 
Ah, well I he is not the only man for w^hom the name that 
rang so sweetly, breathed in the toast of love, has chimed 
a bitter death-knell through all his after-life. 

The Trefusis did her best to lure him into a proposal 
that night, with her black eyes and brilliant smiles, as he 
sat by her at dinner, and leaned out of the window after- 
ward beside her, the delicate perfume of her hair mingling 
with the fragrance of lilies, and roses, and heliotropes from 
the garden below, the low jug-jug of the nightingale join- 
ing with their own low voices, and the voluptuous summer 
starlight gleaming on both their faces — his, impassioned, 
eager, earnest; hers, triumphant, exquisitely handsome, 
but the beauty of the rock-crystal which will melt neither 
for wintry frost nor tropic sunshine. She did her best, and 
the hour and the scene alike favored her. She bent for- 
ward, she looked up in his face, and the moon’s rays gave 
to her eyes a liquid sweetness never their own. The night 
ingale sang softly of love under the dark laurustinus- 
boughs; the flowers sent up their more luxurious fragrance 
with the rich evening dew. De Yigne began to lose con- 
trol over himself; the passion within him took the reins; 
he who all his life through had denied himself nothing. 


>30 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


neither knew nor cared how to check it. He bent toward 
the Trefusis, his fiery pulse beating loud ; his moustaches 
touched her low smooth brow: Heaven knows what he 
might have said, but I went up to them, ruthlessly: 

“De Yigne, the horses are put to, and Miss Trefusis 
wants to be in town by eleven, in time for Mrs. Delany’s 
ball: everybody’s gone, or going.” 

A fierce oath was muttered under De Yigne’s moustaches 
— he can be fiery enough if he’s crossed. The Trefusis 
gave me a look — well I such as you, madame, will never 
give a man if you are prudent, even though he be your 
lover’s fidus Achates, and comes in just when he is not 
wanted. Then she rose, drawing on her gloves with a 
sweet, courteous smile: 

'‘Oh! thank you, Mr. Chevasney; how kind of you to 
come and tell us. I would not be late at dear Mrs. De- 
lany’s for the world, you know : she is a very pet friend of 
mine.” 

I had saved him that time, and, idiot-like, triumphed at 
my success. Might I not have known that no forty-horse 
power can keep a man from committing himself if he is 
bent upon it? and might I not have known that if a fellow 
enters himself for a steeple-chase with a woman, she will 
have cantered in and carried off the cup before he has 
saved half the distance, let him pride himself upon his 
jockeyship never so highly ? 

I had saved De Yigne, and I don’t think he bore me 
any good-will for it, for after he had bestowed the Trefusis 
in the Fantyre brougham, he took his havana and drove 
me and a couple of other men back in his phaeton to Ken- 
sington in gloomy and grandiose silence. He could not 
go to Mrs. Delany’s, for the best of all reasons, that he was 
not asked. Ladies never do invite with their pet friends 
the quarry their pet friends are trying the hardest to lure ; 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


131 


not from envy, pretty little dears I who would think of 
accusing them of thatf Do they ever, by any chance, 
break the Tenth Commandment, and covet their neighbor’s 
carriage, horses, or appointments, diamonds, point, flirta- 
tions, or anything that she has ? 

The day after the Trefusis went down to Brighton, to 
drive the Dragoons distracted, who would see her canter- 
ing over the South Downs with some stray acquaintance, 
who lent her one of his horses, .and in return lost his heart 
to those imperious black eyes ; or waltz with her at one of 
their own balls, to drink in intoxication with the clang of 
The Express; or meet her on the Esplanade, that magnifi- 
cent face enhanced by her little cobweb lace veil, swaying 
them all with her grand beauty, as if her little carved ivory 
parasol handle had been a scepter as potent as Venus’s 
ceinture. 

De Yigne stayed in town, and let her go, thank Heaven 
without putting his love, and name, and honor into Con 
stance Trefusis’ s hands. 


PART THE FIFTH. 

I. 


HOW DE VIGNE COURTS IRON GYVES, AS THOUGH THEY 
WERE SOFTEST ROSE CHAINS. 

De Vigne and I consumed not a little cognac and Caven 
dish, swearing over our durance vile, when everybody, ex 
cept unlucky dogs of militaires, had departed, and town 
was empty; shutters up in all the windows where we had 
w.ont to see delicate hot-house flowers, and as beautiful 
English faces; not a wiggy coachman nor a showy hack in 


132 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Ring or Ride ; not a lounger by the rails, nor a note of 
the Life Guards band; the club-rooms empty, newsless, 
and dreary, great markets of gossip without either scandal- 
mongers or hearers, a forlorn wight or two sitting in them 
with the papers all to himself, but far from enjoying the 
monopoly — everything shut up, everything at a stand-still, 
even Paterfamilias of Russell Square and Bloomsbury had 
taken himself off to eat shrimps and admire the “hoceau” 
at Margate; even Brown, Jones, and Robinson had got 
their fortnight from Coutts’s or Barclay’s, and were gone 
to shoot sparrows with their country cousins, or to Bou- 
logne, under the impression that they should have “done 
France ;” all the sang pur was gone, and a good deal of the 
canaille, and we were left in London, I thirsting to be 
stalking royals with Sabretasche up in his Inverness-shire 
moor, and De Vigne longing to be after a finer covey still 
So, after six weeks’ consummation of anathemas, soda wa- 
ter, and Latakia, sufficient to last a troop for a twelve- 
month, he and I were delighted enough when we were at 
last swinging down in the express to Yigne on the 31 st of 
August. I wondered in my mind he was not off to Kemp 
Town, but I was too glad to find the partridges outbalanced 
the Trefusis to make any comment upon it. Yigne was 
about sixty miles from London, aed we were at the station 
in a couple of hours or so, where a drag waited for us 
with four blood bays, whose grooms glowed with repressed 
delight at sight of their master. De Yigne, though of 
somewhat imperious temper, and immeasurably haughty to 
people of pretentious rank, was cordially liked by his de- 
pendents ; and I have always noticed that servants alw^ays 
like best those who, while they treat them well, never let 
them forget their difference of degree. Yigne was a pretty 
picturesque village, and nearly every rood of land belonged 
to him ; and his park was almost as magnificent a sweep 


GRANVILLE JE VIGNE. 


133 


of land as Holcombe or Longleat. The I)e Yignes of 
Yigne went far back in English annals, farther than any in 
the peerage ; and De Yigne would have no more accepted 
a title than a partnership in a brewery. He looked back 
on a pure ancestry — ambassadors, scholars, soldiers, chan- 
cellors, ministers, gentlemen always; and many a tale of 
daring and danger, many a record of high honor and chival- 
ric deeds, were told to him as a child of those courtly men 
in hauberk and corslet, in velvet and point, with their stem 
brows, and their perfumed love-locks, and their powdered 
wigs — men who had wooed and won in courts and camps, 
and made their names famous either through pen or sword. 

It was with something warmer than pride that he looked 
across over his wide woodlands glowing in the August 
sunset, the great elm-trees throwing their wide cool shad- 
ows far over the rich pasture land beneath ; the ferns, from 
the tiny feathery sprays up to the giant leaves, high as a 
man’s elbow, waving in the fresh breezes, the deer troop- 
ing away into the deep green glades and the lengthened 
avenues, stretching off in aisles of burnished green and 
gold, like one of Creswick’s rich English landscapes of 
checkered light and shadow. A mile and a half of one of 
those magnificent elm avenues brought us to the house, 
more like Hardwick Hall in exterior than any other place 
I know. It stood grandly, too, something as Hardwick 
does; but in interior, though the hall and other parts of it 
were medieval enough, it was what Hardwick certainly is 
not — or was not, when last I saw it — luxurious and modern 
to the last degree, with every elegance and comfort that 
upholstery and science have taught the nineteenth century 
to look upon as absolute requirements. 

De Yigne threw the ribbons to a groom, and sprang 
down, while the deep bay of the dogs in the kennels some 
way off gave him a welcome to his taste. In the hall he 
VOL. L 12 


ISi GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

had another: his mother,' Lady Flora, a soft, delicate 
woman, with eyes and voice of great beauty and sweetness, 
came out from a morning room to meet him, with both her 
hands outstretched, and a fond smile on her face. De 
Yigne loved his mother tenderly and reverentially. She 
had been a wise woman with him : as a child, she stimu- 
lated his energies instead of repressing them, and, with 
strong self-command, let him risk a broken limb rather 
than teach him his first idea of fear, a thing of which De 
Vigne was as profoundly ignorant as little Nelson. As a 
boy, she entered into all his sports and amusements, listen- 
ing to his tales of rounders, ponies, cricket, and boating, 
as if she really understood them. As a man, she never 
attempted to interfere with him. She knew that she had 
trained him in honor and truth, and was too skilled in 
human nature to seek to pry into a young man’s life. The 
consequence was, that she kept all her son’s affection, trust, 
and confidence, and, when she did speak, was always heard 
gently and respectfully; and he would often tell her as 
naturally of his errors and entanglements as he had, when 
a child, told her of his faults to his servant or his Shetland. 
The house was full, chiefly of men come down for the 
shooting, with one or two girls of the Ferrers family, Lady 
Flora’s nieces, who would have liked very well to have 
caught their cousin Granville, for their father, though he 
was a Marquis, was as poor for a peer as a curate with six 
daughters and no chance of preferment. But 'their cousin 
Granville was not to be caught — by their trolling, at 
least. 

“ I am delighted to see you, Mr. Chevasney,” said Lady 
Flora, when I went down to the drawing-room after ablu 
tion and hot coffee. “You know you are always a favorite 
of mine, at first, ne vous en deplaise, because you were a 
friend of Granville’s, and then for your own sake. There 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


135 


W 1 .U hb iome people here to-morrow to amuse you. not but 
what you gentlemen never seem to me so happy as when 
you arrj without us. Shut you up in your smoking, or 
billiard, or card room, and you want nothing more I'’ 

“True enough I” laughed De Yigne. “It is an ungal- 
lant admission, but it is a fact, nevertheless. See men at 
college wines, in the jollity and merriment of a camp, in 
the sans gone enjoyment of a man dinner 1 Deny it who 
will, we can ht, happy without the beau sexe, but the beau 
sexe cannot be happy without us 1” 

“How conceited you are, Granville I” cried Adelina 
Ferrers, a handsome blonde, who thought very well of her- 
self. “I am qutW sure we can.” 

“Can you, Lin»?” said De Yigne, leaning against the 
mantle-piece, and w;.tching his mother’s diamond rings flash 
in and out as she did some bead-work. “ Why do we 
never hear of ladieb- parties, then ? Why, when we come 
in after dinner, do Wr; invariably find you all bored to the 
last extent, and half asleep, till you revive undbr our kindly 
influence ? Why, if you are as happy without us, do we 
never see you estabhiih women clubs to drink tea, or eau 
de Cologne, or sal voiatile, and read new novels and talk 
over dress 

“ Because we are too kind. Our society improves you 
so much, that, through principle, we do not deprive you of 
it,” answered Lady Lina, with a long glance of her large 
turquoise eyes. 

“That’s a pity, dear,” smiled De Yigne, “because, if we 
thought you were comfortably employed, we could go off 
to the partridges to-morrow with much greater pleasure ; 
whereas, to know, afi we do, that you will all be victims of 
ennui till we come back again, naturally spoils sport to 
men like myself, of tender conscience and amiable disposi- 
tion. You have ‘The Princess’ now in your hand, Lina; 


136 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


that will tell you how ladies who fancied they could be 
happy without us came to grief I” 

“ This is the fruit of Miss Trefusis’s flattery, I suppose,^’ 
sneered Blanche Ferrers, the other cousin, who could not 
appreciate fun, and who had made hard running after De 
Yigne a season ago. 

“Miss Trefusis never flatters,” said De Vigne, quietly. 

“Indeed I” said Blanche. “I know nothing of her. I 
do not desire I” 

The volumes expressed in those four last words were 
such as only women like Blanche Ferrers could possibly 
compress in one little sneering sentence. De Yigne felt 
all that was intended in it: his eyebrows contracted, his 
eyes flashed fire ; he had too knightly a heart not to defend 
an absent woman, and a woman he loved, as dearly as he 
would his own honor. 

“It would be to your advantage, Blanche, if you had 
that pleasure. Miss Trefusis would make any one proud 
to know her; even the Ladies Ferrers, though the world 
does say they are fond of imagining the sun created solely 
that it may have the honor of shining on them.” 

He spoke very quietly, but sarcastically. His mother 
looked up at him hastily, tlien bent over her work; Blanche 
colored with annoyance, and smiled another sneer. 

“Positively, Granville, you are quite chivalrous in her 
defense. I know it is the law at Yigne for nobody to disa- 
gree with you; nevertheless, I shall venture, for I must 
assure you that, far from esteeming it an honor to know 
Miss Trefusis, I should deem it rather a — dishonor 1” 

How like a lion fairly roused and longing to spring he 
looked. He kept cool, however, but his teeth were set 
hard. 

“Lady Blanche, it is rather dishonor to yourself to dare 
to speak in that manner of a lady of whom you have never 


GllANVn.LE DE VIQNE. 


13 : 


heard any evil, and who is my friend. Miss Trefusis is aa 
worthy respect and admiration as yourself, and she shall 
never be mentioned in any other terms in my presence.” 

How gallant he looked, with his steady eyes looking 
sternly down at her, and his firm mouth set into iron. A 
whole history of love and trust, honor and confidence, the 
chivalry that defended the absent, the strength that pro- 
tected the woman dear to him, were written on his face. 
By Heaven I to think it should all be w'asted upon her! 

Blanche laughed a derisive laugh, but a little timidly, 
though ; it was not easy even for her to be rude to him. 

“ Respect and admiration I Really, Granville, one would 
believe report, and imagine you intended to give Lady 
Fantyre’s — whatf — niece, dependent, companion — which 
is it? — your name.’’ 

“Perhaps I do. As it is, I exact the same courtesy 
for her, as my friend, that I shall do if ever she be — my 
wife I” 

He spoke slowly and calmly, still leaning on the mantle- 
piece ; but his face was white with passion, and his dark 
eyes glowed like fire. What a dead silence followed his 
words: the silence of breathless astonishment, of unutter- 
able dismay. Lady Flora turned as white as her bead- 
work, and she did not trust herself to look at her son. In 
a moment or two she spoke, with the same gentle dignity 
she always had. 

“Blanche, you forget what you are saying. You can 
have no possible right to question your cousin’s actions or 
opinions. Let this be the last I hear of such a discussion. 
Mr. Chevasney, if you wish to be useful, will you be kind 
enough to hold this skein of floss silk for me?” 

Just at that moment some of the men came in and sur- 
rounded Adelina and Blanche ; it was a relief to every- 
body. Lady Flora went on winding her silk, not daring 

12 * 


138 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to look up at her son. He stayed where he was, leaning 
on the mantle-piece, playing with a setter’s ears, till dinner 
was announced as served ; then he gave his arm to the 
Marchioness, and was especially brilliant and agreeable 
all the evening. 

That night, however, when most of us had gone off to 
our dormitories to dream of the joys of stubble and turnip- 
field, De Yigne rapped at the door of his mother’s dress- 
ing-room. She expected it, and admitted him at once. 
He sat by the fire some moments, holding her hand in his 
own. De Yigne was very gentle with what he loved. His 
mother looked up at him, with a very few words : “ Dearest, 
is it true?” “Yes.” Where he meant much, he also gener- 
ally said few words. 

His mother was silent. Perhaps, until now, she had 
never realized how entirely she would lose her son to his 
wdfe; how entirely the new passion would sweep away and 
replace the old affection; how wholly, and how justly, his 
confidences, his ambitions, his griefs, his joys, would go to 
another instead of to herself; perhaps she knew how en- 
tirely unfit De Yigne was to be curbed and tied, how much 
his fiery nature would shrink from the burden of married 
life, and his fiery heart refuse to give the love exacted as 
a right; perhaps she knew, by knowledge of human nature, 
and experience of human life, how true it is that “a young 
man married is a man that’s marred.” 

“Your wife!” she said, at last, thick tears in her voice 
and in her eyes. “Granville, you little guess how those 
words sound to me; how much I have hoped, how much I 
nave feared, how much I have prayed for in — your wife. 
Forgive me, dear; I can hardly accustom myself to it 
yet.” 

She bent her head, and sobbed bitterly. May we believe, 
with Madame de Girardin — 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


139 


O’eet en vain qne Ton nomine erreur, 

Cetto secF^te intelligence, 

Qui portant la lumi^re au fond, 

Sur des maux ignores nous fait g6mir d’avance? 

De Yigne bent his head, and kissed her. It was very 
rarely he saw his mother’s tears ; in propiortion to their 
rarity they always touched him. They were both .of them 
silent The next question she asked came with the resig- 
nation of a woman to a man whose purpose she knows she 
can never alter, nor even sway, any more than she can 
stir the elm-trees in the avenues from the beds that they 
have lain in for such lengthened centuries. 

“You really love her then 

“More passionately than I have ever loved a woman 
yet.” 

That sealed the sentence. Lady Flora knew that never 
in love or in sport had De Yigne checked his fancy or 
turned back from his quarry. 

“ God help you then I” 

He started at the uncalled-for prayer. It was an in- 
voluntary utterance of the deep tenderness, the undefined 
dread with which she regarded his future. He smiled 
down at her. “Why, mother, what is there so dreadful 
in love? One would fancy you thought shockingly of 
your sex, to view my first thought of marriage through 
smoked glasses.” 

She tried to smile. “It is such a lottery.” 

“Of course it is; but so are all games of chance; and, 
if one ventures nothing, one may go without play all one’s 
life. As for happiness, that is at very uncertain odds at 
all times, and the only wise thing one can do is to enjoy 
the present, and let the future go hang. Does not La 
Bruyere tell us that no man ever married yet, who did not 
in twelve months’ time wish he had never seen his wife? 


140 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


It is true enough for that matter; so that, whether one 
does it sooner or later, one is equally certain to repent.” 
He spoke with a light laugh and a fearless confidence in 
his own future which went to his mother’s heart. She 
took both his hands in hers. 

“Granville, you know I never seek to interfere with 
your opinions, plans, or actions. You are a man of the 
world, far fitter to judge for yourself than I am to judge 
for you; but no one can love you better than I.” 

“Indeed no,” said De Yigne, tenderly, “none so well.” 

“And’ no one cares for your future life as I. Therefore, 
will you listen to me for a minute ?” 

“Sixty, if you like.” 

“Then,” said his mother gently, “do you really think 
yourself that you are fitted for married life, or married life 
fitted for you ?” 

“Don’t put it in that way,” said De Yigne, impatiently. 
“Married life? No, not if I were chained down into dull 
domesticity; but in our position marriage makes little or 
no difference. We keep the same society, have the same 
divertissements. We are not chained together like two 
galley-slaves, toiling away at one oar, without change of 
scene or of companion. Constance Trefi^sis must be my 
wife, because, if she is not, I shall go mad ; but she is not 
a woman only fit ‘to suckle fools and chronicle small beer,’ 
and she would be the last to deprive me of that liberty of 
which you are quite right in thinking I should chafe inces- 
santly at the loss. But I am talking myself, net listening 
to you. What else were you going to say ?” 

“ I was going to say — are you sure you will ?»ever love 
again ?” 

De Yigne grew impatient again. He threw h<»-ck his 
head; these were not pleasant suggestions to him. 

“ Really, my dear mother, you are looking very fa’^ into 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


141 


futurity. How can I, or any other man, by any possibility, 
answer such a question ? We are not gods, to foresee 
what lies before us. I know that I love now — love more 
deeply than I have ever done yet, and that is enough for 

me 

“That is not enough for me,” answered his mother, with 
a heavy sigh. “I can foresee your future, for I know your 
nature, your mind, your heart. You will marry now, in 
the mad passion of the hour ; marry as a thousand men do, 
giving up their birthright of free choice, and liberty, and 
an open future, for a mess of porridge of a few months’ de- 
light. I know nothing of Miss Trefusis, nor do I wish to 
say anything against her; but I know you. You marry 
her, no doubt, from eye-love ; for her magnificent beauty, 
which report says is unrivaled. After a time that beauty 
will grow stale and tame to you ; it will not be your fault; 
men are born inconstant, and eye-love expires when the 
eye has dwelt long enough on it to grow tired and satiated. 
Have you not, times out of number, admired and wearied 
before, Granville ? Then there will come long years of 
regret, impatience of the fetters once joyfully assumed; 
perhaps — for you require sympathy and comprehension — 
miserable years of wrangling and reproaches, such as you 
are least fitted of all men to endure. You will see that 
your earlier judgment was crude, your younger taste at 
fault; then, with your passions strengthened, your dis- 
cernment matured, you will love again — love with all 
the tenderness, the vehemence, the power of later years 
. — love, to find the crowning sorrow of your life, or to 
drag another in to share the curse you already have 
brought upon yourself. Can you look steadily at such a 
future ?” 

A chill of ice passed through his veins as he heard her; 
then he threw the presentiment olf, and his hoi blood 


1455 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


flowed on again in its willful and fiery course ; he answered 
her passionately and decidedly. 

Yes. I have no fear of any evil coming to me through 
my love. If she will, she shall be my wife, and whatever 
my future be I accept it.” 

The day after I found the reason for De Vigne’s throw- 
ing over Brighton for his own home. The Trefusis and 
Lady Fantyre came down to stay at Follet, a place some 
three or four miles from Yigne, with some friends of the 
Fantyre’s, whose acquaintance she had made on the Conti- 
nent, people whom De Yigne knew but slightly, but whom 
he now cultivated more than he generally troubled himself 
to do much more exclusive members of that invariably 
proud, stuck-up, and pitiably-toadied thing, the county. 

The first of September came, gray, soft, still, as that de- 
lightful epoch of one’s existence always should, and up with 
the dawn we swallowed beer and coffee, devils and ome- 
lettes, and all the agremens of breakfast too hastily to half 
appreciate them, and went out, a large party ; for Sabre- 
tasche had come there the night before, and several other 
men too, to knock the birds over in De Yigne’s princely 
preserves. What magic is there in sport to make us so 
mad after it? What is the charm that lies hid in the whirr 
of the covey up from the stubble, and the clear sharp ring 
of the Purdey, that makes dandies of Pall Mall never so 
happy as when wading through plowed fields in sloppy 
weather, and fastidious exclusives warm with boyish verve, 
carrying their gun through dripping turnips, knee-deep in 
mud, or dead beat but triumphant with the knowledge of 
twenty brace in the bag on the pony’s back ? A strange 
charm there is — a charm we enjoy too much to analyze it; 
and De Yigne, whose head and heart were full of different 
game, and Sabretasche, who hated dirtying his hands, and 
shrank from most people and most things as too coarse for 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


143 


his artistic taste, alike enjoyed it with the dogs and the 
beaters round them in the wide open fields, or lying in the 
shade of some great hedge-trees, discussing Bass and a hot 
luncheon with more appetite than they ever had for the 
most delicious bouquet of claret or the daintiest hors 
d’oeuvre at Tortini’s. 

A splendid day’s sport we had ; and though De Vigno 
did not allow a battue on his lands, I think we had almost 
as many head of game in the bags as if we had had one, 
when twilight had put an end to the ever-glorious and ever- 
longingly-anticipated First, and we had returned to our 
cozy rooms in the bachelor’s wing to dress for dinner. 
Coming out of mine I met De Yigne, looking not one bit 
more tired than if he had been lying all day on a sofa in 
the drawing-room, dressed with the quiet taste that charac- 
terized him. De Yigne detested Brummelism or fopism of 
any species, yet I bet you he looked as thorough-bred with 
his plain, delicate linen, and his little ribbon tie, as his an- 
cestors used in velvet and cloth of gold, steinkirks of point 
and shoe-buckles of diamonds. He put his hand on my 
shoulder with his old kind smile. 

“Well, Arthur, hadn’t we good sport to-day? I say, 
send off any of that game you lik^ anywhere; you know 
lots of people, I dare say. Isn’t it beautiful to see Sabre- 
tasche knock down the birds, for such a iazy fellow as he is, 
too ?” 

“He doesn’t shoot better than you.” 

“Don’t .you think so? But then he’s s. disciple of the 
dolce, and I always go hard at anything X take in hand, 
not but what I am idle enough, in all conscience, some- 
times.” 

“You don’t sell your game?” I asked, knowing I might 
just as well ask him if he sold hot potatoes. 

“Sell it? No, thank you. I am not a poulterer. I 


144 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


have sport, not trade; and the men who sell the game 
their friends help them to kill should write up over their 
lodge-gates, ‘ Game sold here by men who would like to be 
thought gentlemen, but find it a Josing concern.’ I would 
as soon send my trees up to London for building purposes 
as ray partridges to Leadenhall. The fellows who do that 
must have some leaven of old Lombards, or Chepe gold- 
smiths in them ; and though they have an escutcheon in- 
stead of a sign now, can’t get rid of the trader’s instinct.” 

I loved to set De Yigne up on his aristocratic stilts, they 
were so deliciously contradictory to the radical opinions he 
was so fond of enunciating occasionally. The fact was, he 
was an aristocrat at his heart, a radical by his head, and 
the two sometimes had a tilt and upset one another. 

“Is anybody coming to dinner to-day?” I was half 
afraid somebody was whom I detested to see near him 
at all. 

“Yes,” he answered, curtly. “There are the Levisons, 
Lady Fantyre and Miss Trefusis, Jack Cavendish, and 
Ashton of Boxwood.” 

For my life I couldn’t help a long whistle, I was so 
savage at that woman getting the better of us all so 
cleverly. 

“The deuce I De Yigne, your mother and that nasty, 
gambling, story-telling old Fantyre will hardly run in 
couples.” 

For a second liis cheek flushed. 

“It is my house, I invite whom 1 see tit. As for my 
mother, God bless her ! she will hardly ever find a woman 
good or true enough to run in couples with her. She is 
too good and true to be prudish or censorious. I have 
always noticed that it is women who live in glass houses 
who learn quickest to throw stones, I suppose in the 
futile hope of inducing people to imagine that their 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


145 


dwellings are of spotless stone, such as nobody could pos- 
sibly assail. 

“Why the devil, De Yigne,” said I, “arc you so mad 
about that woman ? What is it you admire in her 

He answered with the reckless passion that was day by 
day getting more mastery over him. 

“How should I define? I admire nothing — I admire 
everything. I only know that I will move heaven and 
earth to win her, and that I would shoot any man dead 
who ventured to dispute her with me 

“Is she worth all that ?” 

His eyes grew cold and annoyed ; I had gone a step too 
far. He took his hand off my shoulder, and saying, with 
that icy hauteur which no man could assume so chillingly 
as himself, “My dear Chevasney, you may apply the lesson 
I gave Lady Blanche yesterday, to yourself ; I never allow, 
either to me or of me, any remarks on my personal con- 
cerns,’^ passed down before me into the hall, where, just 
alighted from the Levisons’ carriage, her cerise-hued cloak 
dropped off one shoulder, something shining and jeweled 
wreathed over her hair, the strong wax-lights gleaming on 
her face, with its rich geranium-hue in the cheek, and its 
large, black, luminous eye, and its short, curved, upper lip, 
stood in relief against the carved oak, dark armor, and 
deep-hued windows of the hall — the Trefusis. 

How grandly He Yigne went down the wide oak stair- 
case and across the tessellated pavement to her side, to 
welcome her to Yigne — how tenderly he bent toward her 
— ^how passionately he looked down into her upraised face, 
and she — she thought, I dare say, as she glanced round, 
ihat it would be a conquest worth making: the master 
and — the home. 

Lady Flora looked earnestly at Constance as she entered. 
It was the first time she had seen her, for the Trefusis was 

18 k 


VOL. I. 


146 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


out driving when, by her son’s request, she called on the 
Levisons, with whom she had not more acquaintance than 
an occasional dinner or recontre at some county gathering. 

Splendid as Constance looked — and that she was mag- 
nificent her worst enemies could never deny — in that hard 
though superb profile, in those lips curved downward 
though of such voluptuous beauty, in those eyes so relent- 
less and defiant though of such perfect hue and shape, his 
mother found how little to hope, how much to fear 1 

Yet the Trefusis played her cards well. She was very 
gentle, very sweet, to Lady Flora. She did not seem to 
seek De Yigne, nor to try and monopolize him ; and with 
the Ladies Ferrers she was so calm, so self-possessed, and 
yet had so little assumption, that, hard as Lina and Blanche 
were studying to pick her to pieces, they could not find 
where to begin, till she drew off her glove at dinner, when 
Blanche whispered to Sabretasche, who had taken her in, 
“No sang pur therey but plenty of almond paste;” to 
which the Colonel, hating the Trefusis, but liking De Yigne 
too well to give the Ferrers a handle against their possible 
future cousin, replied, “Well, Lady Blanche, perhaps so — ^ 
but one is so sated with pretty hands and empty heads, that 
one is almost grateful for a change.” 

Whereat Blanche, all her governesses, Paris schools, and 
finishing not having succeeded in drilling much under- 
standing into her brain, was bitterly wrathful, and, en 
consequence, smiled extra pleasantly. 

The Trefusis acted her part admirably that night, and 
people less skilled in society and physiognomy than Lady 
Flora would have been blinded by it. 

“ What a master spirit of intrigue is that woman I” said 
Sabretasche to me, as he watched De Yigne leaning over 
Constance’s chair, while the Ferrers sang bravuras that 
excruciated the Colonel’s fastidious aural senses. “Yet 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


147 


she is not a talented woman by any means. But no man 
' — certainly no man in love with her — can stand against 
the strong will and skillful artifices of an ambitious and de- 
signing intrigante. Solomon tells you, you know, Arthur, 
that the worst enemy you young fellows have is woman, 
and I tell you the same.” 

“Yet, if report speaks truly, the sex has no warmer 
votary than you ?” 

“Whenever did report speak truly? Perhaps I may bo 
only revenging myself; how should you know? It is the 
fashion, I know, to look on Pamela as a fallen star, and on 
Lovelace as a horrid cruel wretch. I don’t see it always 
so myself. Stars that are dragged from heaven by the 
very material magnets of guineas, cashmeres, love of dress, 
avarice, or ambition for a St. John’s-wood villa, are not 
deeply to be pitied ; and men who buy toys at such low 
prices are not utterly to be censured for not estimating 
their goods very high. The price of a virtuous woman is 
not often above rubies ; it has this difference, that the 
rubies set as a bracelet will suffice for Coralie, while they 
must go round a coronet to win Lady Blanche. Apropos 
of Blanche, whatever other silly things you do, Chevasney, 
never make an early marriage.” 

“I never intend, I assure you,” I said, tartly. I thought 
he might have heard of Gwendolina, and be poking fun at 
me ; and Gwen, I knew, was not for me, but for M. le Due 
de Yieillecour, a poor, wiry, effete old beau, who had been 
about Charles X. 

“ Very well, so far ; but you need not look so indignant ; 
no man can tell into what he may be drawn. No one is 
so secure but what next year he may have committed the 
sin or the folly he utterly condemns or ridicules now. 
Look at De Yigne ; six months past he would have 
laughed in your face if you Lad spoken to him of marriagi 


148 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Now he would be tempted to knock you down if you at- 
tempted to dissuade him from marriage. What will he 
gain by it ? What will he not lose ? If she were a nice 
girl, he would lose his liberty, his pleasant vie de gar9on, 
his power of disposing of himself how and where he list, 
and of doing what he chose, without query or comment. 
With a woman like the Trefusis he will lose still more; he 
will lose his peace, his self-respect, his belief in human 
nature, and it will be well if he lose not his honor. He 
will have always beside him one from whom his better 
taste revolts, but to whom his hot-headed youth has fettered 
him, till one or the other lies in the grave. There is no 
knowing to what madness or what misery his early marriage 
may not lead him, to what depths of hopelessness or error 
the iron fetters of the Church and law may not drag him. 
Were he a weak man, he would collapse under her strong 
rein, and be henpecked, cheated, and cajoled; being a 
strong-willed one, he will rebel, and, still acting and see- 
ing for himself, will find out in too short a time that he 
has sacrificed himself, and life, and name, to — a mistake !” 

He spoke very earnestly for listless, careless, nonchalant, 
indolent Sabretasche, and his eyes grew inexpressibly 
melancholy with the utterance of his prophecy. I stared 
at him, for he was almost proverbially impassive; he 
caught my eye, and laughed. 

“What do you think of my sermon, Arthur? Bear it 
in mind if you are in danger, that is all. When will those 
girls have finished those interminable songs? What a 
cruelty it is to society at large to have Scapper and Garcia 
teach women to sing whether they happen to have a note 
in their voice or not I Will you come out into the card- 
room, and have a game or twt at ecarte? You play 
wonderfully well for one so young as you are, but then you 
say a Frenchman taught you. I hate to play with a man 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


149 


who cannot beat me tolerably often; there is no excite 
ment without difficulty. The Trefusis knows that. Look 
at her flirting with Monckton in her stately style, while De 
Vigne stands by, looks superbly indifferent, and chafes all 
the time like a hound held in leash while another dog is 
pulling down the stag!” 

“She will not make you happy, Granville I” said his 
dother that night, when he bid her good night in her 
dressing-room, as was his invariable custom. 

He answered her stiffly. “ It is unfortunate you are all 
so prejudiced against her.” 

“I am not prejudiced,” she answered, with a bitter sigh. 
“ Heaven knows how willingly I would try to love anything 
that loves you, but a woman’s intuition sees farther some- 
times than a man’s discernment can penetrate, and in Miss 
Trefusis, beyond beauty of form and feature, I see nothing 
that will satisfy you, Granville ; there is no beauty of mind, 
no beauty of heart! The impression she gives me is, that 
she is an able schemer, a clever actress, able to seize on the 
weak points of those around her and turn them to her own 
advantage, but that she is illiterate, ambitious, and heart- 
less !” 

“You wrong her and you wrong yourself!” broke in De 
Yigne, passionately. “Your anxiety for me warps alike 
your justice to her and your own penetration and charity 
of feeling. I should have thought you above such injustice 
and petitesses.” 

“1 only wish I may do her injustice,” answered his 
mother, gravely. “But oh, Granville, I fear — I fearl 
Dearest, do not be angry, none will ever love you more 
unselfishly than I ! If I tremble for your future, it is only 
that I know your character so well. I know all that, as 
years go on, your mind will require, your heart exact, 
from the woman who is your wife I know how quickly 

13 * 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


IDO 

the glamour fades in the test of constant intercourse ; 1 
know that your wife will need to have wit, talent, fascina- 
tion, in a very uncommon degree to keep you faithful to 
her ; she will need to give you unusually passionate and 
lavish affection to chain your wayward heart. A common- 
place, domestic woman would drive you from her side to 
another’s ; a hard, tyrannous, beautiful woman will freeze 
you into ice, like herself. I, who love you so dearly, how 
can I look calmly on to see the shipwreck of your life? 
My darling I my darling! I would almost as soon hear 
that you had died on a battle-field, -as your father did 
before you, as hear that you had given your fate into that 
woman’s hands I” 

His mother’s tenderness and grief touched De Yigne 
deeply ; he knew how well she loved him, and that this 
was the first time she had sought to cross his will, but he 
stooped and kissed her, with fond words, and rose — of the 
same persuasion still. It were as easy to turn the west 
wind from its course, as it sweeps wild and free over the 
sea and land, as by words or counsel, laws or warnings, to 
attempt to stem the self-willed, headlong current of a man’s 
strong love. 

Had any whispered warning to Acis of his fate, would 
he have ever listened or cared when, in the golden sunset 
glow, he saw the witching gleam of Galatea’s golden hair? 
When the son of Myrha gazed up into the divine eyes, and 
felt his own lips glow at the touch of “lava kisses,” could 
he ever foresee, or, had he foreseen, would he have ever 
heeded the dark hour when he should lie dying on those 
same Idalian shores ? 

The Trefusis played her cards ably. A few days after 
she played her ace of trumps, and her opponents were 
obliged to throw up their hands. De Vigne did not ask 
his mother to invite her and Lady Fantyre there , infatuated 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


15) 


though he was, and wisely careless on such subjects generally, 
I think he felt that the old ci-devant orange-girl, with her 
nasty stories, her dingy reputation, and her clever tticks 
with the four honors, was not a guest suitable to his high- 
born, high-bred mother, so thorough a lady in tone and 
manner, voice and mind. But a day or two after was De 
Vigne’s twenty-sixth birthday, a day that — contrary to his 
own taste, but in accordance with old habit, from the time 
when butts of beer brewed at his birth and pipes of comet 
wine laid down by his grandfather, had flowed for his ten- 
antry and guests on his majority — had been celebrated, 
whether he was present or not, with wonderful eclat and 
magnificence. This year, as usual, “the county,” and 
parts of surrounding counties, too, came to a dinner and 
ball at Vigiie; the Levisons had been included in the in- 
vitations a month before we went down, and now. of 
course, the Trefusis would accompany them. 

As De Vigne had not even the slight admixture of 
Roger De Coverley benevolence and Squire Western 
rough patriarchality assumed by some county men at the 
present time, as he had not the slightest taste for oats or 
barley, did not care two straws how his farms went or how 
his lands were let, and hated toadying and flummery as cor- 
dially as he hated bad wine, the proceedings of the day 
very naturally bored him immensely, and he threw himself 
down, after replying to his tenants’ speeches, in one of the 
delicious conches of the smoking-room, with an anathema 
on the whole thing. ‘ 

“ What a happy fellow you are, Sabretasche,” said he to 
the Colonel, who had retired from the scene on to one of 
the sofas, with a pile of periodicals and a case of exquisite 
Manillas “You have nothing on your hands but your 
rown-house, that you can shut up, and your Highland 
lodge, where you can leave your dogs and servants for 


152 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


ten months in the year, and have no yeomanry tenants 
and servants to look to you yearly for sirloins and Oc- 
tober, and a speech that is more trouble to make than 
fifty parliamentary ones.” 

'‘Yes, my dear fellow,” said Sabretasche, “I did stay in 
that tent pitying you beyond measure, till my feelings 
and my olfactory and aural nerves couldn’t stand seeing 
you martyrized, and scenting that very excellent beef, and 
hearing those very edifying cheers any longer ; so, as I 
couldn’t help you, I took compassion on myself, shut my- 
self up with the magazines, and thanked Heaven I was not 
born to that desideratum — ‘a fine landed property I’” 

He Yigne laughed. 

“Well, it’s over now. I shouldn’t mind it so much if 
they wouldn’t talk such bosh to one’s face — praising me 
for my liberality and noble-mindedness, and calling me 
public-spirited and generous, and Heaven knows what. 
They’re a good-hearted set of fellows, though, I believe.” 

“ Possibly,” said Sabretasche ; “ but what extent of good - 
heartedness can make up for those dreadfully broad o’s and 
a’s, and those terrific ‘ Sunday-going suits,’ and those 
stubble-like heads of hair plastered down with oil bought 
at a chemist’s ?” 

“Not to you, you confounded refiner of refined gold,” 
laughed He Yigne. “By-the-by, Sabretasche, don’t you 
sometimes paint lilies in your studio? That raffine opera- 
tion would suit you to a T. I suppose you never made 
love to a woman who was not the ultra-essence of good- 
breeding and Grecian outline ?” 

Sabretasche gave a sort of shudder ; whether at some 
recollection, or at the simple suggestion, I must leave. 

“No I as they say in the ‘ Peau de Chagrin,’ ‘je ne 
concois pas I’amour dans la misere ; une femme fut-elle 
attrayante autant que la belle Helene, la Galatee d’Homhre, 


GRANVILLE L£ VIGNE. 


153 


n^a plus ancun pouvoir sur mes sens pour peu qu’elle soit 
crottee.^ I never did understand adoring barmaids and 
worshiping cooks; the vernacular does for me.” 

“Well, chacun a son gout,” said De Yigne ; “Cupid 
has a vernacular of his own which levels rank sometimes. 
According to some men a pretty face is a pretty face 
whether it is under a Paris bonnet or a cottage straw. 
But what I dislike so in this sort of affair is the false light 
in which it makes one stand. Here am I, who don’t see 
Yigne for nine months out of the year, sometimes not at 
all, who delegate all the bother of it to my steward, who 
neither know nor, care when the rents are paid, nor how 
the lands are divided, cheered by these people as if I w^ere 
a sort of god and king over them — and they mean it, too. 
Their fathers’ fathers worshiped my fathers’ fathers, and 
so they, in a more modern fashion, cheer, and toast, and 
fete me as if I were a combined Cincinnatus and Titus, who 
live only for the welfare of my people, and go to bed dis- 
satisfied if I can’t count up the good deeds I have done in 
the past day. You know well enough I am nothing of the 
kind. I don’t think I have a spark of benevolence in my 
composition. I could no more get up an interest in model 
cottages and prize fruit than I could in Cochin-Chinas or 
worsted work, and the consequence is that I feel a hypo- 
crite, and instead of returning thanks to-day to my big 
farmers and my small retainers, I should have liked to have 
said to them, ‘ My good fellows, you are utterly mistaken 
in your man. I am glad you are all doing well, and I 
won’t let any of you be ground down if I know it, but 
otherwise I don’t care a jot about you, and this annual 
affair is a very great bore to me, whatever it may be to you ; 
and I take this opportunity of assuring you that, far from 
being a demigod, I am a very graceless cavalry man, and 
instead of doing any good with my forty thousand a year. 


i54 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


I only make ducks and drakes of it as fast as I possibly 
can.’ If I had said that to them 1 should have relieved 
myself, had no more toadying, and felt that the Yigneites 
and I understood one another. What a horrid bother it is 
one can’t tell truth in the world !” 

“ Most people find the bother lie in having to tell the trutn 
occasionally,” said the Colonel, with his enigmatical smile. 
“Fot might enjoy having, like Fenelon’s happy islanders, 
only to open your eyes to let your thoughts be read, but I 
am afraid such an expose would hardly suit most of us. 
You don’t agree with Talleyrand, that language is given 
iis to conceal our thoughts.” 

De Yigne looked at him as he poked up his pipe. 

“ Devil take you, Sabretasche 1 Who is to know what 
you mean, or what you think, or what you are ?” 

My dear fellow,” said the Colonel, cutting the West- 
minster slowly with one hand, and taking out his cigar 
witn the other, “nobody, I hope, for 1 agree with Talley- 
rand if you don’t.” 

The County came — a few to dinner, many to the ball, 
presenting all the varied forms of that peculiar little 
oligarchy; a duke, two marquises, two earls, four or five 
bitrons, high- dried, grand old dowagers, with fresh, pretty- 
looking daughters as ready for fun and flirtation as their 
maids ; stiltified county queens, with daughters long on 
h*;nd, who had taken refuge in High- Churching their vil- 
lage, and starched themselves very stiff in the operation ; 
pretty married women, who waltzed in a nutshell, and had 
many more of us after them than the girls ; county beauties, 
accustomed to carry all before them at race balls if not at 
Almack’s, and to be empresses at archery fetes if they were 
only units in Belgravia ; hunting baronets, who liked the 
music of the pack when they throw up their heads much 
better than the music of D’Albert’s waltzes ; meDibers with 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


155 


the down hardly on their cheeks ; other members, whose 
mission seemed much more in the saddle than the benches; 
rectors by the dozen, who found a village dance on the 
green sinful, but a ball at Yigne a very pardonable error ; 
scores of military men, who Oirted more desperately and 
meant less by it than any fellows in the room ; all the 
county, in fact, and among them little old Fantyre, with 
her hooked nose, and her queer reputation, her dirty, price- 
less lace, and her jewels got nobody knew how, and whether 
her daughter, niece, protegee, companion, the inconnue, 
the intrigante, the interloper, but decidedly the belle, hard, 
handsome, haughty Constance Trefusis. Magnificent she 
looked in some geranium-hued dress, as light and brilliant 
as summer clouds, with the rose tint of sunset on them, and 
large white water-lilies in her massive raven hair, turned 
back a I’imperatrice off her low brow, under which her eyes 
shot such dangerous Parthian glances. One could hardly 
wonder that De Yigne offended past redemption the 
Duchess of Mangoldwurzel, ruined himself for life with 
his aunt, the Marchioness of Marqueterie, annoyed beyond 
hope of pardon the Countess of Ormolu, the five baron- 
esses, all the ladies in their own right, all the great heir- 
esses, all the county princesses-roVal, all the archery-party 
beauties, and, careless of rank, right, or comment, opened 
the ball with — the Trefusis. It was her triumph par ex- 
cellence, and she knew it. She knew enough of De Yigne 
to know that what he dared to begin he would dare to 
follow out, and that the more animadversion he provoked, 
the more certainly would he persevere in his own will. 

“We have lost the game said Sabretasche to me. as 
he passed me, waltzing with Adelina Ferrers. 

It was true. De Yigne waltzed that same waltz with 
Constance Trefusis ; I can see, him as if it were last evening, 
whirling her round, the white lilies of her bouquet de cor 


156 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


sage crushed against his breast, her forehead resting on his 
shoulder, his moustaches touching her hair as he whispered 
in her ear, his face glad, proud, eager, impassioned ; while 
the county feminines sneered, and whispered behind their 
fans, what could De Yigne possibly see in that woman ? 
and the men swore what a deuced fine creature she was, 
and wondered what Trefusis she might be. 

And that waltz over, De Yigne gave her his arm and 
led her out of the ball-room to take some ice, and, when 
the ice was disposed of, strolled on with her into the con- 
servatories — those matchless conservatories, thanks to Lady 
Flora, brilliant as the glories of the tropics, and odorous 
as a rich Indian night, with the fragrance exhaling from 
citron and cypress groves, and the heavy clusters of mag- 
nolias and mangoes. There, in that atmosphere, that hour, 
so suited to banish prudence and fan the fires of passion — 
there, to the woman beside him, glorious as one of the 
West Indian flowers above their heads, but chill and un- 
moved at heart as one of their brilliant and waxen petals — 
De Yigne poured out in terse and glowing words the love 
that she had so madly and strangely awakened, laying gen- 
erously and trustfully, as knight of old laid his spoils and 
his life at his queen’s fe^t, his home, his name, his honor 
before Constance Trefusis. She simulated tenderness to 
perfection ; she threw it into her lustrous eyes, she forced it 
into her blushing cheek, it trembled in her softened voice, 
it glanced upward under her tinted lashes. It was all a 
lie, but a lie marvelously well acted ; and when De Yigne 
bent over her, covering her lips with passionate caresses, 
drinking in with every breath a fresh draught of intoxica- 
tion, his heart beating loud and quick with the triumph of 
success, was it a marvel that De Yigne forgot his past, his 
future, his own experience, others’ warnings, anything and 
everything, save the Present, in its full and triumphant 
delirium ? 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


m 


PART THE SIXTH. 

I. 

SOME OF THE COLONEL’S PIIILOSOrflY. 

“I SAY, Arthur — she has outwitted usl” 

*‘The devil she has, Colonel !” 

“Who would have believed him so mad?” 

“Who would have believed her so artful?” 

“Chevasney, men are great fools.” 

“And women wonderful actresses, Colonel.” 

“Right; but it is a cursed pity.” 

“That He Vigne is taken in, or that women are em- 
bodied lies, sir — which?” 

“Both.” 

And with his equanimity most unusually ruflQed, and his 
nonchalant impassiveness strangely disturbed, Sabretasche 
turned away out of the ball-room which De Vigne and the 
Trefusis, after a prolonged absence, had just re-entered, his 
face saying plainly enough that Constance was won ; hers 
telling as clearly that Vigne and its master were caught. 

When the dawn was rising brightly over the tall elm- 
trees, and the great iron gates had closed after the last 
carriage-wheels, De Vigne was talking to his mother in 
her dressing-room. He wished to tell, yet he shrank from 
paining her — it came out with a jerk at last — “My mother, 
wish me joy ' I have won her, and I have no fear I” 

How often she remembered him as he stood there in the 
full light; with so much youth and trust in his face, so 
much joy and passion in his eyes, such a clear, happy ring 
[i his voice 1 When she fully realized his words, she burst 

II 


VCL. I. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


156 

into an agony of tears, the most bitter she had ever shed 
for him ; for whatever in his whole life De Yigne’s faults 
might be to others, in his conduct to his mother he had 
none. He let her tears have their 'way; he hardly knew 
how to console her; he only put his arm gently round her 
as if to assure her that no wife should ever come between 
her and him. When she raised her head, she was deathly 
pale — pale as if the whole of his future hung a dead and 
hopeless weight upon her. She said no more against it ; 
it was done, and she was both too wise and loved him too 
truly to vex and chafe him with useless opposition. But 
she threw her arms round him, and kissed him, long and 
breathlessly, as she had kissed him in his child’s cot long 
ago, thinking of his father lying dead on the Indian shore 
with the colors for his shroud. 

“ My darling ! my darling 1 God bless you I God give 
you a happy future, and a wife that will love you, as you 
can love — will love !” 

That passionate broken prayer was all his mother ever 
said to him of his marriage. But when De Tigne, in all 
the happy spirits and high exultation of his successful pas- 
sion, was riding and driving with his fiancee, or knocking 
down the birds in the open, or waltzing with the Trefusis, 
and lingering in delicious tete-ii-tetes where the hours 
slipped away uncounted, or laughing and jesting with us, 
when the ladies were gone, in the luxurious laisser-aller of 
the smoking-room, I doubt not his mother spent many a 
bitter hour weeping over that future which the prescience 
of affection only too truly revealed to her. 

De Yigne received few congratulations; but that sort of 
thing was quite contrary to his taste, and I think he was 
far too full of delirious success to notice the omission, or 
to resent his aunt’s chill hauteur, or his cousins’ sneering 
innuendoes; on more opposition none of his relatives, not 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


159 


even the overbearing and knock-me-clown Marcnioness 
Marqueterie, who gave the daw to everybody, dared to 
venture. She only expressed her opinion by ordering her 
own carriage for the hour and the day in which the Tre- 
fusis came for the first time to stay at Yigne. Sabretasche 
never opened his lips on the subject to De Yigne, or any- 
body else; but De Yigne, never at anytime a tenacious 
or quickly-irritated man, was too much attached to the 
Colonel, who had almost as great a fascination for one sex 
as for the other, to take exception at his silence, and was, 
indeed, too well content with his venture to care or inquire 
what everybody else thought of it. Lady Flora treated 
the Trefusis with a generous courtesy, that did its best to 
grow into something warmer, and watched her with a wist- 
ful anxiety that was very touching; but it was evident to 
every one that, though Constance was most carefully atten- 
tive, reverential, and gentle to De Yigne’s mother, repress- 
ing everything in herself, or in Lady Fantyre, that could in 
the slightest degree shock or wound her refined and highly 
cultivated taste, she and Lady Flora could never assimi- 
late, or even approach ; that careful courtesy was all that 
would ever link them together, and that in this instance at 
least, the extremes did not touch. 

However, for the three weeks longer that I remained 
there, on the surface all went on remarkably smooth. The 
Ferrers, of course, had left with their mother. The Tre- 
fusis, as I have said, was irreproachable in style, showed 
no undue pride and exultation in her triumph, and would 
have had you believe that she only existed to ministrate to 
the happiness of De Yigne. Sabretasche was infinitely too 
polished a gentleman to show disapproval of what he had no 
earthly business with, and limited himself to an occasional 
satiric remark on the Trefusis, so veiled in subtle wit and 
courtesy, that, shrewd as she was, she felt the sting, but 


160 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


could not find the point of attack clearly enough to return 
it. De Vigne, of course, saw everything coleur de rose, 
poor old fellow ! and only chafed with impatience at the 
probation of an engagement which the Trefusis, having 
custom, the world, and her trousseau in her eye, would not 
allow to end before Christmas, (I think she rather enjoyed 
fretting and irritating him with denial and delay;) and his 
mother resigned herself to the inevitable, and did her very 
best, poor lady! to find out some trace of that beauty of heart, 
thought, and mind, which her delicate feminine instinct had 
told her was wanting in the magnificent personal gifts with 
which nature had enriched the woman who was to be De 
Yigne’s wife. 

So all went harmoniously on at Vigne throughout that 
autumn ; and the Mangoldwurzel family, and the House of 
Ormolu, and all the rest of the County, talked themselves 
hoarse, speculating on the union of Granville de Vigne, one 
of the best matches, and one of the proudest names in Eng- 
land, and an unknown, sans rank, prestige, history, or any- 
thing to entitle her to such an honor, in whom, whether 
she were daughter, niece, protegee, or companion of that 
disreputable old woman, Sarah Lady Fantyre, society 
could decide nothing for certain, nor make out anything at 
all satisfactory. No wonder the County were up at arms, 
and hardly knew which to censure the most — De Vigne for 
daring to make such a mesalliance, or the Trefusis for 
daring to accept it. 

"If I ever took the trouble (which I doidt, because hate 
is an exhausting and silly thing) to hate anybody, it would 
be that remarkably handsome and remarkably detestable 
woman,” said Sabretasche, as he wrapped a plaid round 
his knees on the box of the drag that was to convey him 
and me from Vigne to the station, to take the train for 
Northamptonshire, in which county, well beloved of every 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


161 


Englislinian for the mere riarae of Pytcbley, Sabretasche 
was going down for the five weeks that still remained of 
his leave, and had invited me to accompany him. 

As he whispered this adverse sentiment, I turned to 
look at her as we drove down the avenue. She was 
dressed (why do I never think of that woman without 
recollecting her dress ? was it because she owed so much 
to it?) en amazone, for her saddle-horse was being led up 
and down, with De Vigne’s. She leant on De Vigne’s 
arm, the tight dark jacket setting off to perfection the 
magnificent outlines of her matchless figure, and her black 
wide-awake, with its few cock’s feathers, not shading one 
iota of her severe aquiline profile. She waved us a gra- 
cious farewell with her little riding switch, and he — God 
bless him I — shouted out at last “Good-by, old fellows!” 
We left them standing under the brown elm boughs: she 
looking round the wide expanse of park and woodlands 
that would soon be hers, he gazing down upon the glorious 
face and form that would soon be his, the noon radiance 
of the October sunshine falling full upon them, and on the 
mullion windows and fantastic corbels and grand outline of 
the old house beyond them. Then the bays dashed down 
the avenue, scattering the loose gravel upon either side, 
the drag rolled past the lodge, the iron gates swung to 
with a loud clang, and I saw De Yigne and Constance 
Trefusis no more till their marriage-day. 

I went into Northamptonshire, to a box the Colonel 
hud taken from a friend of his, who, being suddenly called 
to the Cape, had to leave it unoccupied, and enjoyed myself 
uncommonly there, hunting with that most slap-up of 
packs, and managing more than once to be in at the finish, 
by dint of following that best of mottoes, for which we are 
mdebted to the best master of hounds that ever rode to 
cover, “Throw your heart over, and your horse will fol- 

14 * l 


162 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


low.” 1 had wonderfully good fun there in that pretty 
county, consecrated to fox-hunting and apple-trees, view 
halloo and cider, for in every part of England Sabretasche 
had hosts of friends, and where he went there was certain 
to be gathered the best fellows, the best wits, and the best 
wine anywhere about. Each day I spent with him I grew, 
without knowing it, more and more attached to the 
Colonel ; the more I saw of him in his own house, so per- 
fect a gentleman, so perfect a host, the longer I listened 
to his easy, playful talk on men and things, his subtle and 
profound satire on hypocrisies and follies. It was impossi- 
ble not to get, as ladies say, fond of Sabretasche; his 
courtly urbanity, his graceful generosity, his countless ac- 
complishments, his ready wit, all made him so charming a 
companion, though of the real man it was difi&cult, as De 
Yigne said, to judge, through the nonchalance, indolence, 
impassiveness, with which the Colonel chose to veil all that 
he said or did. He might have had some secret or other 
in his past life, or his present career, which no man ever 
knew ; he might be only, what he said he was, an idler, a 
trifler, a dilettante, a blase and tired man of the world, a 
nil admirari-ist. Nobody could tell. Only this I could 
see after a long time, gay, careless, indolent as he was, 
that in spite of the refined selfishness, the exquisite epicu- 
reanism, the light-heartedness, and the luxurious enjoyment 
of life that his friends and foes attributed to him, Vivian 
Sabretasche, like most of the world’s merry-makers, was 
sometimes sad enough at heart. 

“Friends? I don’t believe in friends, my dear boy,” 
said the Colonel, one night when we sat over the fire dis- 
cussing olives and claret and Latakia at our ease, after a 
iong run with the Pytchley, a splendid burst over the 
country, and fifteen minutes alone with the hounds. “Live 
as long as I — which is twice the term by experience that it 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


163 


is by years — and you will have learnt to take those mythi- 
cal individuals at their value. I have scores of friends 
who come, and are particularly kind to me, when they want 
something out of me. I have cousins who quite idolize 
me if they wish for a commission for their son, or a pre- 
sentation at court. I have an Orestes and lolaiis and 
Pylades in every quarter when I am wanted to ballot for 
them at White’s or the Travelers’, or give them introduc- 
tions at Vienna or Rome, or push them through into 
London society. There are hundreds of good fellows who 
like Vivian Sabretasche, and run after him because he 
amuses them, and is a little of the fashion, and is held a 
good judge of their wine, and their stud, and their pic- 
tures. But let Vivian Sabretasche come to grief to- 
morrow, let his Lares go to the Jews, and his Penates to 
the devil ; let the clubs, instead of quoting, black-ball him, 
and the Court Circular, instead of putting him in tl 
Fashionable Intelligence, cite him among the Criminal 
Cases, and lament how Lucifer, son of the morning, is 
fallen, which of his bosom friends will be so anxious then 
to take his arm down St. James’s Street? which of them 
all will feter and invite and flatter him? Will Orestes 
then send him such haunches of venison ? Will lolaiis 
uncork his comet wine for him, and Pylades stretch out 
his hand to him, and pick his fallen pride out of the dirt of 
the gutter, and fight his battle for him when he has crip- 
pled himself? Pshaw I my dear Arthur, I take men at my 
valuation, not at their own. Don’t you know — 

Si vous etes dans la dctressc, 

0 mes amis, cacbez-le bien, 

Car Thomme est bon ct s’interessc 

A ceux qui n’ont besoin de rien!” 

“It is a sad doctrine. Colonel,” said I, who was a boy 
then, and wished to disbelieve him. 


164 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


He laughed a little. “ Sad ? Oh, I don’t see that. The 
first awakening to it may be, is, to many a young fellow 
beginning life with the fancies and hopes of youth ; but 
nothing in life is worth calling sad. According to Hera- 
clitus, everything is sad ; according to Democritus, nothing 
is sad. The true secret is to take things as they come, 
and not trouble yourself sufficiently about anything to give 
it power to trouble you. Enjoy your youth. Take mine 
and Ovid’s counsel — 

Utendum est aetate. Cito pede labitur aetas 

Hac mihi de spina grata corona data est.” 

“ But how’s one to keep clear of the thorns ?” 

“By flying, butterfly-like, from rose to rose, and hand- 
ling it so delicately as not to give it time to prick you. 
Love makes a poetic and unphilosophic man, like Dante 
or Petrarch, unhappy ; but do you suppose that Lauzun, 
Grammont, the Due de Richelieu, were ever made unhappy 
by love ? No ; the very idea makes one laugh ; the poets 
took it au serieux, and suffered in consequence ; the courtiers 
only made it their pastime par excellence, and enjoyed it 
proportionately. It all depends on the way one lays hold 
of the roses of life; some men only enjoy the dew and 
fragrance of the flower, others mismanage it somehow, and 
get only the thorns.” 

“You’ve the secret, then. Colonel,” said I, laughing, 
'‘for you get a whole conservatory of the most delicious 
roses under the sun, and not a thorn, I’d bet, among them 
all.” 

“Or, at all events, my skin is hard enough not to be 
pricked by them,” smiled Sabretasche. “I think many 
men begin life like the sand on the top of a drum, obeying 
every undulation of the air from the notes of a violin near; 
they are sensitive and susceptible, shrinking at wrong or 


GRANVILLE DE VTQNE. 


165 


Injury, easily moved, quickly touched. As years go on, the 
same men are like the same sand when it has been pressed, 
and hardened, and burnt in fusion heat, and exposed to 
chill frosty air, and made into polished, impenetrable glass, 
on which you can make no impression, off whose icy sur- 
face everything glides away, and which it is impossible to 
cut with the hardest and keenest of knives. The sand is 
the same sand ; it is the treatment it has met with that has 
changed it. How I do prose to you, Arthur; and of all 
.ds the one a man has least right to inflict on another ia 
his own theories or ideas. Fill your glass, my boy, and 
pass me those macaroons. How can those poor creatures 
live who don^t know of the Marcobrunuen and macaroons 
of existence? It is a good thing to have money, isn’t it? 
It not only buys us friends, but it buys us what is of infi- 
nitely more value — all the pleasant little agremens of life. 
I would not keep in the world at all if I did not lie on 
rose-reaves.” 

Wnerewith the Colonel nestled himself more comfortably 
into his delicious arm-chair, laid his head on the velvet 
cushions, closed his eyes, and smoked away at his per- 
fumed hookah, full of the most fragrant and delicate 
scented tobacco. My short clay was, I believe, an abom- 
ination to his senses, which courtesy alone induced him to 
tolerate. Sardanapalus himself, or the most exquisitely 
fastidious Pompeian or Greek, might have come to live 
with Sabretasche in a state of the greatest gratification, 
taough he did dwell in the “Barbarian Isle ” 


166 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE 


II. 


now THE MAN MAKES HIS OWN DESTINY, AND THE PATTB 
DE VELOURS STRIKES ITS MOST CRUEL WOUND. 

On the 31st of December, Sabretasche and De Yigne, 
Curly and I (Curly had got his commission in the Cold- 
streams, and was the prettiest, daintiest, most flattered, 
and most flirted with young Guardsman of his time) went 
down by the express, through the snow-whitened fields and 
hedges, to Yigne, where, contrary to custom, its master was 
to take his bride on the first morning of the New Year. It 
was to be a very gay wedding, of course. De Yigne, always 
liberal to excess, now perfectly lavish in his gifts, had, with 
the delicacy of warm feeling, followed the French fashion, 
he said, and given her a corbeille fit for a princess of blood 
royal, which the Trefusis, having no delicacy of appropri- 
ation, accepted as a right. There were to be twelve brides- 
maids, not the quite exclusive and ultra high-bred young 
ladies that would have followed Adelina or Blanche Ferrers, 
but still very stylish- girls, acquaintances of the Tre- 
fusis. There was to be such a breakfast and such rejoicings 
as had never before been seen even at that proverbially 
magnificent place, where everything was ever done en 
grand seigneur. Such a wedding was entirely contrary 
to De Yigne’s taste and ideas, but the more others had 
cuosen to run dov.m the Trefusis, the more did he, in his 
knightly heart, delight to honor her, and therefore had he 
asked pretty well everybody he knew, and everybody went*, 
for all who knew him liked and wished him well, except his 
aunt, the Marchioness of Marqueterie, and, par consequent, 
the Ladies Ferrers. They went, because else the world 
might have said that they were disappointed Granville 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


167 


had not married Blanche ; but very far from wishing him 
well, I think they fervently hoped he would repent his 
hasty step in sackcloth and ashes, and their costly wed- 
ding presents were very like Judas’s kisses. Wedding 
presents singularly often are. As she writes the delicate 
mauve-tinted congratulatory note, wishing dearest Adeliza 
every joy that earth can give, and assuring her she is the 
very beau ideal of a perfect wife, is not Madame ten to 
one saying to her elder daughter, “IIow strange it is that 
Fitz should have been taken in — such a bold, flirty girl, 
and nothing pretty in her, to my taste ?” And as we shake 
Fitz’s hand at our club, telling him he is the luckiest dog 
going to have such a pretty girl, and such a lot of tin by 
one coup, are we not fifty to one thinking, “Poor devil! 
he’s glad of the tin, I suppose, to keep him out of the 
Queen’s Bench ? But, by George ! though I am hard up, 
I wouldn’t take one of those confounded Pevton women 
if I knew it? Won’t she just check him nicely with hei 
check-book and her consols !” 

Whether the congratulations were sincere or not. Be 
Yigne never troubled his head. He had e very happy 
and sensible indifference to the “qu’en dira-t’on?” and he 
was infinitely too much in love to think for a moment 
whether the whispers concerning the Trefusis might or 
might not be true. Most probably, however, they never 
reached him ; reports never do those who could investigate 
or contradict them, though when your horse has fallen 
under you everybody assures you they knew it from the 
beginning — they saw it 8,t once — anybody could tell he was 
broken-winded, and had been down — if they had thought 
you did not know it, they would have warned you. One 
could hardly wonder that if the Trefusis had been proved a 
perfect Messalina or Fredegonde, no man in love with her 
would have given her up as she sat that last evening- of 


68 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the Old Year on one of the low couches beside the draw 
ing-room fire at Yigne, as magnificent with the ruddy 
glow of the fire-gleams upon her as one of Rubens’s or 
Guido’s dark glowing, voluptuous goddesses or sybils. De 
Vigne was leaning over her with eyes for none but her; 
his mother sat opposite them both, delicate, graceful, 
fragile, with her diaphanous hands and fair, pure profile, 
and rich, soft, black lace falling in folds around her, her 
eyes so pitifully, so yearningly fixed upon her son; while 
just behind her, playing ecarte with Curly, who was de- 
votedly fond of that little dangerous French game, was 
old Lady Fantyre, with her keen, wicked eye, and her 
rouged, withered cheek, and her fan and feathers, flowers 
and jewels, and her dress decolletee at seventy-six I 

“Look at De Yigne I” said Sabretasche to me, as we 
came out of the music-room, where some of the brides- 
maids were singing quartets and glees, as — young ladies 
do sing who have been taught bravura and thorough bass, 
and finished by six lessons from Garcia, and imagine they 
know music “scientifically,” as they imagine they know 
French “thoroughly,” though they can’t read old Mon- 
taigne, and are nonplussed by the gay repartee and idio- 
matic elegance of a Parisian salon. “His desires on the 
eve of fulfillment, he imagines his dreams of happiness will 
be also. How he bends over that chair and looks down 
into her eyes, as if all his heaven hung there I Twelve 
months hence he will wish to God he had never looked 
upon her face.” 

“Good Heavens, Colonel I” I cried, involuntarily, 
“What evil or horror do you know of Constance?” 

“None of her, personally,” said Sabretasche, with a sur 
prised smile. “But is she not a woman; and is not Dt 
Yigne, poor fellow, marrying too early? With such prem* 
ises my phophecy requires no diviner’s art to make it tk 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


169 


very safe one. As great a contrast as that rouged, atro 
ciously-dressed, abominable old orange-woman is to his 
own charming and graceful mother, will be De Yigne’s 
real future to his imaginary one. However, he is proba- 
bly in Socrates’ predicament, whether he take a wife or 
not, either way be will repent, and he must be satisfied; 
he will have the handsomest woman in England. Few 
men have as much as that!” 

“Ladies ought to hate you, sir,” said I, “instead of 
loving you idolatrously as they do; for you certainly are 
their bitterest enemy.” 

“Not I,” laughed Sabretasche. “I am very fond of 
them, except when they try and hook my favorite friends, 
and then I would say to them as Thales said to his mother, 
that in their youth they are too young to be fettered, and 
after their youth they are too old. I am sorry for De 
Vigne — very sorry ; he is doing what in a little time, and for 
all his life through, he will long and thirst to undo. But 
he must have his own way ; he must do what he chooses, 
and perhaps, after all, as Emerson says, marriage may be 
an open question, as it is alleged from the beginning of 
the world, that such as are in the institution want to go 
out, and such as are out want to get in. .Marriage is like 
a mirage ; all the beauty it possesses lies in keeping at a 
distance from it.” 

He moved away v/ith that light laugh which always 
perplexed you as to whether he meant what he said in 
mockery or earnest, whether it really vexed him or 
whether he was only laughing at it, and began to arrange 
the pieces for a game at chess with one of the ladies. If 
It vexed and annoyed Sabretasche and myself — we who 
liked De Yigne as one of the best fellows, and one of the 
pluckiest, most generous-hearted and most clear-headed 
men going — it must have made his mother, who literally 
VOL. I 15 


i:o 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


idolized him as the sole thing left to her on earth, bitterly 
sad, to see the impassioned eagerness, the joyous trust with 
which he looked forward to his future, and know — as she 
and we, who were not dazzled by the radiance of that ex- 
terior beauty of form and feature, knew by instinct — that 
Constance Trefusis, haughty, overbearing, cold as marble, 
of neither finished education, cultured mind, nor refined 
taste, would be the woman of all others from whom, in 
maturer years, De Yigne would be most certain to revolt. 
A man’s later loves are sure to be an utterly different and 
distinct style from his earlier. In his youth he only asks 
for what charms his eyes and senses ; in manhood — if he 
be a man of taste and intellect at all — he will go further, 
and require interest for his mind and response for his 
heart. 

The last hour of the Old Year chimed at once from the 
bell-tower of Vigne, the belfry of the old village church, 
and the countless clocks throughout the house. A little 
gold Bayadhre on the mantle-piece struck the twelve strokes 
slowly and musically on her tambourine. Lady Flora, in 
her own boudoir, heard it with passionate tears, and on her 
knees prayed, as Andromache prayed for the Molossus 
threatened by the jealous hate of Hermione, for her son’s 
new future that the new year heralded. De Vigne, alone 
in the library with Constance Trefusis, heard it, and pressed 
his lips to hers, with words of rapturous delight, to wel- 
come the New Year coming to them both. Sabretasche 
heard it as he leant over the chair of a very lovely married 
woman, flirting d outrance, and bent backward to me as J 
passed him: “ There goes the death- knell ! The last day 
of De Vigne’s freedom is over. Go and put on sackcloth 
and ashes, Arthur.” 

The Colonel’s words weighed curiously upon me as I 
rose and dressed on the morning of New Year’s-day, aa 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ni 

bright and fair and sunny a dawn as ever broke over the 
old elm avenues of Yigne. I, a young fellow scarcely 
two-and-twenty, pretty well as careless, as light-hearted, 
and as little accustomed to take things au serieux as any 
man living, who looked on life and all its chances as gayly 
as on a game at cricket, who should have come to thivS 
wedding as I had gone to a dozen others, only to enjoy 
myself, drink the Ai and Sillery, and flirt with all the filles 
d’honneur, — dressed with almost as dead a chill upon me 
as if I had come to De Vigne’s funeral rather than to his 
marriage — a chili that I could not for the life of me shake 
off, do what I would. I really loved De Vigne, as he, natu- 
rally, never cared for me. I have a sad knack of attaching 
myself strongly to one or two people, and only one or two, 
and my Frestonhills hero had always been among my weak- 
nesses in that particular. When I was a little chap I all 
but adored him; our haughty senior, who, when he chose 
to notice us, was so cordially kind, rattled the stumps so 
magnificently, lent us his rifle and his hack, and taught us 
such inimitable rules for batting or long bowling. After- 
ward, he inviting me to Yigne, and I going into the same 
troop with him, I had seen more of his generous, straight- 
forward, out-of-the-common character, his clear, vigorous, 
liberal intellect, and I loved him — loved him far too well 
to see him throw himself away on the Trefusis, without 
annoyance and futile regret. There seemed little reason 
for regret, however, as I met him that morning coming out 
of his room, and he held out his hand with his sweet sunny 
smile, the smile that passed over his face with a lightning 
flash, and lit up his dark eyes, and curved the haughty 
lines of his mouth into greater archness and sweetness 
than I ever saw in any man’s features. I wished him joy 
in very few words — I wished it him too welt to be able to 
get up an elegant or studied soeech. 


172 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


“Thank you, dear Arthur,” he answered, turning his 
door-handle with a joyous, light-hearted laugh; “I am 
sure all the fairies would come and bless my wedding-day 
if you’d anything to do with the ordering of them. But, 
thank Heaven I fairies or no fairies, my happiness is safe. 
Come in, old fellow, and have a cigar — my last bachelor 
smoke — it will keep me quiet till Constance is out of her 
maids and filles d’honneur’s hands. Faugh ! how I hate 
the folly of wedding ceremonial. The idea of dressing up 
Love in white favors, and giving him bride-cake 1 It was 
not so Cupid and Psyche were wed. I think Eros would 
have turned his back on the whole affair if they had sub- 
jected him to a bishop’s drawl and a register’s prosaic 
business. Try those Cubas, Arthur.” 

He smoked because, my dear young ladies, men accus- 
tomed to the horrid weed can’t do without it, even on their 
wedding-day, but quiet he was not; he had at all times 
more of the tornado in him than anything like the Colonel’s 
equable calm, and he was restless atid excitable, and happy 
as only a man in the same cloudless and eager youth, the 
same fearless and vehement passion, can be. He soon 
threw down his Cuba, for a servant came to tell him that 
his mother would like to see him in her own room ; and 
De Yigne, who had been ceaselessly darting glances at the 
clock, which, I dare say, seemed to him to crawl ou its 
way, went out joyous as Romeo’s 

Come what sorrow may 
It cannot countervail the interchange of joy, 

and never thought of Friar Laurence’s prophetic reply: 

These violent delights have violent ends. 

And in their triumph die; like fire and powder. 

Which as they kiss consume. 

By noon we were all ready. In the magnificent dining-hall, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 




with its bronzes and its deer’s-heads, and the regimental 
colors of his father’s crack corps looped up between the 
two end windows, with his helmet, saber, and gloves above 
them, the breakfast, sumptuous enough to have done for 
St. James’s or the Tuileries, was set out with its gold 
plate, its hot-house flowers, and its thousand delicacies, and 
in the church the wedding party was assembled with the 
noon sun streaming in through the colored light of the 
stained chapel windows. It was a very brilliant party. There 
were the Marchioness of Malachite and the Ladies Fer- 
rers, exquisitely got up, of course, though looking bored 
to the last extreme, and appearing to consider it too great 
an honor for the mosaic pavement to have the glory of 
bearing their footsteps. There were other dainty ladies 
of rank, friends of Lady Flora’s, sweet, smiling-looking 
women in toilettes that might have come out of Le Follet, 
and in which, being ladies born, they were easy and care- 
less as children in brown holland pinafores. There were 
the dozen bridesmaids in their gauzy dresses and their 
wreaths of holly or of forget-me-not; there were hosts of 
men, chiefly military, whose morning mufti threw in just 
enough shade among the bright dresses, as brilliant by 
themselves as a bouquet of exotics; there were, strangely 
enough, close together, bizarre, quick-eyed, queer old Lady 
Fantyre, and soft, fragile Lady Flora ; and there was De 
Yigne, standing near his mother, chatting and laughing 
with Sabretasche, but all his senses alive to catch the first 
sound which should tell him of the advent of his bride. 

How well I can see him now, as if it were but yesterday, 
standing on the altar steps in our plain modern morning 
dress, where in chain armor and silken doublet, in velvet 
coat and point-lace ruffles, in powdered wig and Garter 
and Batli ribbons — his ancestors, through long ages past, 
had wedded noble gentlewomen and fair patrician girls 

15 * 


174 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


from the best r.nd bravest houses in the land — I think I 
see him now, standing erect, his head up, one hand in the 
breast of his waistcoat, his eyes, dark as night, brilliant 
and luminous with eagerness; his mouth, with a shadow 
of a smile softening its firm, clear-cut lips, a little flush of 
excitement and anticipation on his usually pale cheek; not 
a shade, not a wish, not a fear seemed to rest upon him, 
“By Heaven I she’s not half worthy of him,” I muttered, 
quite unconsciously speaking ray thoughts. His mother 
heard me; her eyes were riveted on him with a mournful 
tenderness she could not or did not care to conceal, her 
lips quivered, she looked at me, and shook her head. That 
wedding party was very brilliant, but there was a strange, 
dull gloom over it which every one felt yet nobody could 
explain, and, save in De Vigne himself, and a few of the 
bridesmaids and younger men, there was none of the joy- 
ous light-heartedness which make “marriage-bells” pro- 
verbial for mirth and gayety. 

There was a very low but an irrepressible murmur of 
applause as the Trefusis alighted from her carriage, with 
her pro tempo father and donor. Never had we seen her 
look so handsome. Her magnificent form was seen to full 
advantage through the shower of Honiton lace that fell 
around her and about her from her head, till it trailed be- 
hind her on the ground. The glowing damask-rose hue of 
her cheeks, not one whit the paler this morning, and the 
splendid contour of her profile, were enhanced, not hidden, 
by the filmy veil. A wreath of orange-flowers, of course, was 
in her raven hair, and a ceinture of diamonds, worthy an 
imperial trousseau — one of the gifts of her lavish and be- 
witched lover, with a neglige and bracelets like it — were 
jewels fitted to her fully-developed and magnificent person. 
Yery handsome she was — undeniably handsome, and her 
figure was matcHess; but I looked in vain, as her eyes 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


176 


rested on De Vigne’s, for one saving shadow of love, joy, 
natural emotion, tremulous feeling, to denote that he was 
not utterly thrown away — wedded to a matchless statue 
of responseless marble. 

She passed up to the altar with her retinue of brides- 
maids, in their snowy dresses and bright wreaths. The 
service began; one of the Ferrers family, the Bishop of 
Southdown, read the few words that linked them for life 
with the iron fetters of the Church. Every one who caught 
the glad, firm, eager tone of De Yigne’s “I will,” remem- 
bers it to this day — remembers with what trusting love, 
what unhesitating promptitude he took the vow for “better 
or worse.” Prophetic words that say, whatever ill may 
come of the rash oath sworn, there will be no remedy for 
it; no help, no repentance that will be of any avail; no 
furnace strong enough to unsolder the chains they forge 
forever I 

De Yigne passed the ring over her finger; they knelt 
down, and the priest stretched his hands over them, and 
forbade those whom God had joined together any man to 
put asunder. And they rose — husband and wife. They 
came down the altar steps, De Yigne’s face beautiful in its 
frank joy, its noble pride, looking down upon her with his 
brilliant eyes, now soft and gleaming, while she looked 
straight before her, her full ruby lips slightly parted with 
a half smile, probably of triumph and exultation, that she, 
unknown and unsupported, called by all an interloper, by 
many an intrigante and adventuress, was now the wife of 
the last of a haughty house, whose pride throughout length- 
ened centuries had ever been that all its men were brav,'' 
and all its women pure, that not a taint rested on its name, 
not a stain upon its blood, not a spot upon its shield. 

We passed down the church into the vestry, De Yigne 
gazing down on her with all the wealth of his passionate 


GRANVUiLE DE VIGNE. 


heart; but he had no answering glance of love. The day 
of acting, because the need for acting, was over now. The 
register was open. De Vigne took the quill, and dashed 
down hastily his old ancestral name ; he passed it into her 
hand, with fond whispered words. She took it, threw back 
her veil, and wrote firmly and clearly, 

“Constance Lucy Trefusis — or Davis.” 

De Vigne was bending fondly over her, his moustaches 
touching her hair, with its virginal crown, as she wrote. 
With one great cry he suddenly sprang up, as men will do 
upon a battle-field when they are struck with their death- 
wound. Laying her hands in his he held her away from 
him, reading her face line by line, feature by feature, with 
the dim horror of a man in a dream of supernatural agony. 
She smiled in his face, the smile of a devil. 

“Granville de Vigne, do you know me now?” 

Yes, he knew her now ; he still held her at arm’s length, 
staring down upon her, the truth in all its horror eating 
gradually into his very life, seeming, as it were, to turn his 
warm veins to ice, and chill his very heart to stone. She 
laughed — a low mocking laugh of vengeance and derision, 
that broke strangely on the dead silence round them. 

“ Yes I Granville, yes I my young lover, I am your Wife, 
of your own act, your own will. Do you remember the 
poor milliner you mocked at? Do you remember the 
peasant girl you deserted ? Do you remember the summer 
day under the chestnut trees, when you laughed at my 
threats of vengeance? Do you remember, my hushandi 
I vowed then that you should love me again, love me 
really, love me madly; and that it should be my turn to 
disappoint your passion, to crush your pride, to dishonor 
you forever in your own eyes and the eyes of all others. 
Before all your titled friends have I taken my revenge. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


i71 


that it may be the more complete. I would not wait for 
it, or spare you one iota of your shame. I renounce my 
own ambitions to humble you lower still. They are hear- 
ing us, all your haughty relatives, your fastidious friends, 
your aristocratic acquaintance, who have tried so long and 
so vainly to stop you in your mad passion for me. They 
listen to me, and they will go and tell the world what you 
would never have told it, that the last of his line has given 
his home, his honor, his mother’s place, his father’s name — 
that proud name that only yesterday you told me no diS' 
grace had ever touched, no bad blood ever borne — to the 
despised love of his boyhood, his own cast-off low-born 
toy — a beggar’s child, a ” 

“Peace !” 

At that single word, so stern in its iron command, so 
full of deep, unutterable agony, she was silenced perforce. 
The blood had left his lips and cheeks, the ashy hue of 
death had settled on his forehead in a dark crimson stain, 
like the stain on his own honor; his eyes were set and 
fixed, as in the unspeakable torture of the Laocoon ; his 
teeth were clinched as men clinch them in their death 
struggle; one hand was pressed on his heart; he had let 
go his hold on hers; he would never touch even her hand 
again ; and he panted for breath as if he were sulfocated. 
In the horror of the moment all round him were dumb and 
paralyzed ; even she, in her rancorous hate and bitter ven- 
geance on him, paused awe-stricken at the ruin she had 
wrought, silent before the terrible storm of passion, the un- 
utterable anguish, shame, and horror written in his face. 

“Peace ! woman — devil ! Never cross my path again, 
or I shall not let you go as I do now!” 

Speaking with a strange unnatural calm that sounded 
more fearful to us than the wildest outburst of rage or an- 
guish, De Yigne, with his right hand pressed hard upon 

m 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


m 

his chest, turned to leave the church. But his mother 
threw herself before him. “ Granville, my love, my darling 1 
stay, for God’s sake, stay I” 

He strained her to his heart, then put her gently aside 
to Sabretasche. 

“Let me go — let me go I” he said, hoarsely. 

We could none of us attempt to stop him. He pushed 
his way through the crowd like a madman, and we heard 
the rapid rush of his carriage wheels as they rolled away — 
God knows where. 


PART THE SEYENTII. 

I. 


SABRETASCHE STUDIES THE BELLE OP THE SEASON. 

On another Hew Year’s Hay, eight years from that 
marriage in the church at Yigne, the full relentless tropic 
sun streamed down on the parched sand and tangled jungle 
of India, where, in the sultry stillness of the noon, when 
all nature was hushed into repose, a contest for life and 
death raged with all the fury of men’s passions unchained 
and their love of blood unsated. Far away on the blue 
hills slept the golden noontide rays, still and motionless in 
the tropic heat; the great palm-leaves folded themselves 
up for a siesta ; the jaguars and the tigers lay couched in 
the cool dank jungle grass; the florikens and parrots 
closed their soft, brilliant-hued wings to rest; all nature 
in the vast mountain solitudes was at peace; even the 
bananas and bamboos had ceased their gentle motion, and 
the silver river was calm and unruffled as a tideless lake 


I 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 179 

pausing in its rapid rush from its mountain cradle to its 
ocean grave. All nature was hushed and still, except the 
passions of man ; they, always warring, never silenced by 
the soft voices of inanimate beauties, were struggling 
fiercely under the low trees and amid the thick jhow jun- 
gle. It was a skirmish of English cavalry and Beloochee 
infantry, in a small plain between large woods or hunting- 
grounds, and the sun shone with a fiery glow on the dark 
uniforms, glittering sabers, and white linen helmets of the 
Europeans, and the gorgeous turbans, bright-hued gar- 
ments, and large dark shields of the mountaineers, as they 
struggled together, darkening the air with their clashing 
swords, and breaking the holy hush of wood and hills with 
long rolling shouts, loud and terrible as thunder. The 
mountaineers doubled the English foree; they had sur- 
prised them, moreover, as, not thinking of attack, they 
trotted onward from one garrison to another, and the 
struggle was sharp and fierce. The English were but half 
a regiment of Hussars, under command of their Major, 
and the odds were great against them. But at their head 
was one to whom fear was a word in an unknown tongue, 
in whose blood was fire, and whose heart was bronze. Sit- 
ting down in his saddle as calmly as at a meet, his eyes 
steady and quick as an eagle’s, hewing right and left like 
a common trooper, the English Major fought his way. 
The Beloochee swords gleamed round him without harm, 
while, let them guard their turbans as they might with 
their huge shields, every stroke of his saber told home. 
They surged around him, they caught his charger’s bridle, 
they opposed before him one dense and bristling forest of 
swords; still he bore a charmed life, alike in single combat 
hand to hand, or in the broken charge of his scattered and 
decimated troop. In the fierce noontide glow, in the piti- 
less vertical sun-rays, while the w’ld shouts of the natives 


180 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


rang up to the still blue heavens above, and the ceaseless 
clang and clash of the sabers and shields startled the birds 
from their rest, and roused the slumbering tiger from his 
lair, the English Major fought like grim death, as those 
blows glanced harmless off him, as from Achilles of old ; 
fought till the native warriors, stern and savage heroes as 
they were, fled from his path, awe-stricken at his fierce 
valor, his matchless strength, his godlike charm from all 
their efforts to harm him. He pursued them at the head 
of his cavalry, after the skirmish was over, some way 
across the plain ; then, as he drew the bridle of his foam- 
ing and trembling horse, and put his sword back into its 
sheath, another man near him looked at him in amaze- 
ment: “On my life, De Yigne, what an odd fellow you 
are. You look like the very devil in the midst of the 
fight ; and yet w^hen it’s over, after sharper w'ork than any 
even we have seen, deuce take you if you’re not as cool as 
if you’d walked out of a barrack-yard.” 

The same 1st of January, while they were enjoying this 
cavalry skirmish in Scinde, we were being bored to death 
by a review at Woolwich. The day was soft and bright, 
no snow or frost, as Sabretasche, with his Italianized con- 
stitution, remarked with a thanksgiving. There w^ere Ours 
and Cardigan’s Eleventh, and the fashion-famous Twelfth, 
and one or two regiments of Dragoons from Uxbridge and 
Hounslow, with the Blues from Albany Barracks, some of 
the line, and several batteries of Horse Artillery; there 
was Royalty to inspect us ; there were some of the pretti- 
est women possible in their carriages in the inner circle, 
though it was not the season ; and there was as superb a 
luncheon as any military man could ask, in the finest mess* 
room in England; and we, ungrateful, I suppose, for the 
goods the gods gave us, swore away at it all as the great- 
est bore imaginable. It is a pretty scene enough, I dare 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


m 


Bay, to those who have only to look on ; the bright uni- 
forms and the white plumes, the grays and the bays, the 
chestnuts and the roans, the dashing staff and the cannon’s 
peaceful roar, the marching and the counter-marching, the 
storming and the sortie, the rush and the charge, and the 
gallop of four or five troops of horse, formed into line in 
sections of threes, with their lances gleaming diamond 
bright in the sunshine, and their chargers spurred along, 
seemingly with go enough in them, if they were but racers, 
to win the Derby itself — I dare say it may be all very 
pretty to lookers-on, but to us,-heated and bothered and 
tired, obliged to go into harness which we hated as cor- 
dially as we loved it the first day we sported it in our 
cornethood, we thought it a nuisance inexpressible, and 
should have far preferred fatiguing ourselves for some 
purpose under the jungle-trees in Scinde. 

We were profoundly thankful when it was all over and 
done with, when H.R.H. F.M. had departed to Windsor 
without luncheon, and we were free to go up and chat with 
the women in the inner circle, and take them into the mess- 
room. There were very few we knew,’yet up in town; 
but parliament was just about to meet very unusually early 
that year, and there were several from jointure houses, or 
charming places at Richmond, or Twickenham, or Kew, 
with whom we were well acquainted. 

'‘There is Lady Molyneux,” said Sabretasche, who was 
now Lieut.-Colonel of Ours. “I dare say that is her 
daughter with her. 1 remember she came out last season, 
and she was very much admired, but I missed her by going 
that Ionian Isle trip with Brabazon. Shall we go and be 
introduced, Arthur? She does not look bad style, though 
to be sure these English winter days are as destructive to 
a woman’s beauty as anything well can be.” 

The Colonel wheeled his horse round up to the Moly- 
16 


VOL. I. 


182 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


aeux barouche, and I followed him. Eight years had not 
altered Sabretasche in one iota; he had led the same 
lounging, indolent, refined, fashionable, artistic kind of 
life, his face was as exquisitely handsome, his wit as light 
and sparkling, his conquests as various and far-famed as 
ever; he was still soldier, artist, sculptor, dilettante, man 
of fashion, all in one, the universal criterion of taste, the 
critic of all beauties, pictures, singers, or horses, popular 
with all men, adored by all women, and really chained by 
none. Therefore Yivian Sabretasche, whose word at 
White’s or the U. S. could do more to damage or increase 
her daughter’s reputation as a belle than any other man’s, 
had a very pleasant bow and smile in the distance from 
Lady Molyneux, and a very delicate lavender kid glove 
belonging to that peeress, put between his fingers when he 
and I rode up to her carriage. 

“Ah !” cried Lady Molyneux, a pretty, supercilious- 
looking woman, who was passee, but would not by any 
means allow it, “I am delighted to see you both. We only 
came to town yesterday. Lord Molyneux has taken a 
house in Lowndes Square. It was so tiresome of him; 
but he would do it: he is never happy out of London, and 
there is positively scarcely a soul that we know here as yet. 
Rushbrooke persuaded us to come to this review to-day, 
and Violet wished it. Allow me to introduce my daughter 
to you. Violet, love. Colonel Sabretasche, Mr. Chevasney, 
Miss Molyneux.” 

Violet Molyneux looked up in the Colonel’s face as he 
bowed to her, and probably thought — at least she looked 
as if she did — that she had never seen any man so attract- 
ive as the Colonel, as he returned her gaze v/ith his large, 
soft, mournful eyes, and that exquisite gentleness and 
high- breeding of manner, to which he owed half his repu- 
tation in the tender secrets of the boudoir and fiirtiug- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


183 


room ; and leaning his hand on the door of the carriage, 
bent down from his saddle, studying the new belle, while he 
laughed and chatted with her and her mother. We used 
to jest, and say Sabre tasche kept a list of the new beauties 
entered for the year — as BeWs Life has a list of the young 
fillies entered for the Oaks — made a cross against those 
worth noticing, and checked off those already flirted with 
and slain ; for the Colonel — though he was the last man to 
say so — was indisputably as dangerous to the beau sexe as 
Pignerol de Lauzun. 

Violet Molyneux was certainly worthy of being entered 
in this mythical book, for she was irresistibly charming and 
exquisitely lovely; her complexion white as Parian, with a 
wild-rose color in her cheeks, her eyes large, brilliant, and 
wonderfully expressive, generally flashing with the sweetest 
laughter; her hair of a soft, bright, chestnut hue; her 
figure slight, but perfect in symmetry; on her delicate 
features the stamp of quick intelligence, heightened by the 
greatest culture; and in her whole air and manner the 
grace of good ton and fashionable dress, mingled with the 
frankness, the vivacity, the joyous light-heartedness, the 
candid truth-telling of a child. Bright, natural, gifted 
with the gayest spirits, the cleverest brain, and the sweetest 
temper possible, one could not wonder that she was talked 
over at clubs; engaged by more than her tablets could 
record at every ball ; and followed by a perfect cavalcade 
when she cantered, faster than any other girl would have 
dreamed of doing in town, down the crowded Ride. 
Sabretasche soon took her off to the mess-room, a Lieu- 
tenant-General escorting her mother, and I found myself 
sitting on her left at the luncheon, an occasion I did not 
improve as much as I otherwise should have done, from the 
fact of Sabretasche’s being on the other side, and persuading 
the young .ady to give all her attention to him; for Sabre- 


184 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


tascne, though he was immeasurably fastidious, and scarcely 
ever was really interested in any women, liked to flirt with 
them all, and always made himself charming to them. The 
Hon. Violet seemed to find him charming too, and chatted 
with him gayly and frankly, as if she had known him for 
ages Though she was one of the admitted belles, and 
was run after (and enjoyed the pursuit, too) by scores of 
men, she was free, natural, and unartificial as the little 
flower after which she had been named ; a wonderful treat 
to Sabretasche, so sick to death of artificialities and com- 
monplaces. 

“IIow I enjoyed the review to-day 1” she began. “If 
there are three sights greater pets of mine than another, 
they are a review, a race, and a meet, because of the dear 
horses.” 

“Or their masters?” said Sabretasche, quietly. 

Violet Molyneux laughed merrily. 

“ Oh 1 their masters are very pleasant too, though they 
are certainly never so handsome, or so tractable, or so 
honest as their quadrupeds. Most of my friends abuse 
gentlemen. I don’t; they are always kind to me, and, 
unless they are very young or stupid, generally speaking, 
amusing.” 

“Miss Molyneux, what a treat!” smiled Sabretasche, 
who could say impudent things so gracefully that every one 
liked them from his lips. “You have the candor to say 
what every other young lady thinks. We know you all 
liko us very much, but none of you will ever admit it. But 
you say you enjoyed the review. T thought no belle, after 
her first season, ever condescended to ‘enjoy’ anything.” 

“Don’t they?” laughed Violet; “how I pity them! I 
am an exception, then, for I enjoy an immense number of 
things — everything, indeed, except my presentation, where 
I was ironed quite flat, and very nearly crushed to death 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


1S5 


and, finally, came before her Majesty in a state of collapse 
like a maimed India-rubber ball. Not enjoy things I Why, 
I enjoy my morning gallop on Bonbon, I enjoy my flowers, 
and birds, and dogs. I delight in the opera, I adore 
waltzing, I perfectly idolize music, and the day when a 
really good book comes out, or a really good painting is 
exhibited, I am in a seventh heaven. Not enjoy things! 
Oh, Colonel Sabretasche, when I cease to enjoy life, I hope 
I shall cease to live 1” 

‘‘You will die very early, then,” said Sabretasche, with 
something of that deepened melancholy which occasionally 
stole over him, but which he was always careful to conceal 
in society. 

She started, and turned her bright eyes upon him, sur- 
prised and stilled ; 

“ Colonel Sabretasche I Why ?” 

He smiled; his usual gay, courteous smile. 

“Because the gods will grudge earth so fair a flo'^^er, ana 
men so true a vision, of what angels ought to be; but — 
thanks to Scripture, poets, and painters — never arc.” 

She shook her head with a pretty impatience : 

“Ah I pray do not waste compliments upon me; I detest 
them.” 

“Yraiment?” murmured the Colonel, with a little quiet, 
incredulous glance. 

“Yes, I do, indeed. You don^t believe me, I dare say. 
Because I have so many of them. Captain Ohevasney? 
Perhaps it is. I have many more than are really compli- 
mentary, either to my taste or my intellect.” 

“Ladies like compliments as children like bonbons,” 
said Sabretasche, in his low trainante voice. “They will 
take them till they can take no more ; but if they see ever 
so insignificant a one going to another, how they long for 
16 * 


186 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


it, how they grudge it, how they burn to add it to their 
store 1 This is ceil de perdrix, will you try it ?” 

“No, thank you,’^ answered the Hon. Yiolot, with a 
ringing laugh. The sarcasms on her sex did not seem to 
touch or disturb her; she rather enjoyed them than other- 
wise. “What is the news to-day?” 

“Nothing remarkable,” answered Sabretasche. “Births, 
deaths, and marriages all put together, to remind men, like 
Philip of Macedon’s valet, that they come into the world 
to suffer in it, and go out again. Leaders full of toadyism, 
or bullying of the government, according as the journal is 
Conservative or Liberal. Long letters from gentlemen, 
frightfully prone to the didactic style, upon all the evils of 
England, whose name is legion ; yet to remedy which, I 
question if one of those portly plethoric friends and lovers 
of the state would like individually to leave his arm-chair 
and sacrifice his own personal comforts a la Curtius. Let- 
ters on the Income-tax, from men who dodge it all their 
lives; letters on Education, from men who, to judge from 
their grammar, never received any, and, therefore, you will 
say, can the better, perhaps, appreciate the luxuries of it; 
letters on Religious Impetus, written by the aid of a 
whisky-bottle; articles on Ragged Schools, penned elo- 
quently by scoundrels in quod; extraordinary meteors 
thrown in to fill up a gap; criticisms on good novels by 
beardless boys, who don’t know the meaning of half their 
words or quotations. Much like all other news, you see, 
Miss Molyneux, except that your name is down as among 
those arrived in town, and my friend De Yigne is men- 
tioned for the Bath.” 

“Ah I that Major de Yigne!” cried Yiolet. “Where 
is he ? — who is he ? — what has he really been doing ? I 
heard Lord Hilton talking about him last night, saying 
that he had been a most wonderful fellow in India, and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


187 


that the natives called him — what was it? — ‘the Charmed 
Life,’ I think. Is he your friend ?” 

“My best,” said Sabretasche. “Not Jonathan to ray 
David, you know, nor lolaiis to my Orestes: we don’t do 
that sort of thing in these days. We like each other, but 
as for dying for each other, that would be far too much 
trouble; and, besides, it w^ould be bad ton — too demon- 
strative. But I like him ; he is as true steel as any man 
I know, and I shall be delighted to have a cigar with him 
again, provided it is not too strong a one. Dying for 
one’s Patroclus w^ould be preferable to enduring his bad 
tobacco.” 

Violet looked at him with her radiant, beaming glance: 

“Well, Colonel Sabretasche, if your cigar is not kindled 
warmer than your friendship, it will very soon go out again, 
that’s all I” 

“Soit! there are plenty more in the case,” smiled Sabre- 
tasche, “and one Havana is as good as another, for any- 
thing I see. But about De Vigne you have heard quite 
truly ; he has been fighting in Scinde like all the Knights 
of the Round Table merged in one. He is Major of the 
— th Hussars, and he has done more with his handful than 
a general of division might have done with a whole 
squadron. His Colonel was put hors de combat with a 
ball in his hip, and De Vigne, of course, had the command 
for some time. The natives call him the Charmed Life, 
because, despite the risks he runs, and the carelessness 
with which he has exposed his life, he has not had a single 
acratch, and both the Sepoys he fights with, and the Be- 
loochees he fights against, stand in a sort of awe of him. 
The — tb is ordered home, so we are looking out to see 
him soon. I shall be heartily glad, poor old fellow !” 

“Provided, I suppose, he bring cheroots with him good 
enough to allow him admittance?” said Violet. 


188 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ Sous-eiitendu,” said the Colonel. “I would infiniiely 
prefer losing a friend to incurring a disagreeable sensation. 
Would not you ?” 

“Oh! of course,” answered the young lady, with a rapid 
flash of her mischievous eyes. “Frederick’s feelings, when 
he saw Katte beheaded, must have been trifling child’s 
play to what the Sybarite suffered from the doubled rose- 
leaves 1” 

“Undoubtedly,” said Sabretasche, tranquilly. “I am 
glad you agree with me. If we do not take care and un- 
double the rose-leaves for ourselves, we may depend on it 
we shall find no one who will take so much trouble for us. 
To ‘Aide-toi et Dieu t’aidera’ they should add ‘Aide-toi 
et le monde t’aidera,’ for I have always noticed that Provi- 
dence and the world generally befriend those who can do 
without the help.” 

“Perhaps there is a deeper meaning in that,” answered 
Yiolet, “and more justice than first seems. After all, those 
who do aid themselves may deserve it the most, and those 
whose heads and hands are silent and idle hardly have a 
right to have the bonbons of existence picked out and 
given to them.” 

“I don’t know whether we have a right to them, but we 
find them pleasant, and that is all I look at; and besides. 
Miss Molyneux, when you have lived a little longer in the 
world, you will invariably find that it is to those who have 
much that much is given, and vice versa. Guineas pour 
into the gold plate held by that ‘decidedly pious person’ 
Lord Savinggrace, but pence will do for the parish poor- 
box. Turtle and tokay are given to an heir-apparent, but 
a cutlet and new port will suffice for a younger son. Estab- 
lish yourself on a pedestal, the world will worship you, even 
though the pedestal be of very poor brick and mortar; lie 
modestly down on a moorland, though it be, like James 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


189 


Fergusson, for genius to study science, why, you may lie 
there forever if you wait for anybody to pick you np.’^ 
“True enough,” said Violet, “because the guineas given 
to Lord Savinggrace will bring you eclat in the ‘religious 
world,’ (an eclat, by the way, I should shun as offensive 
alike to good taste and all decency,) and in the parish 
poor-box their name is unrecorded. With the heir-ap- 
parent they look for numberless good dinners in return, 
whereas the younger son can do them no good whatever; 
and, with regard to the pedestal, why, we know the nation 
ran after and caressed Castlemaine, while they neglected 
and starved John Milton, because the countess held good 
things in her gift, and the poet was poverty-stricken and 
on the side of a fallen cause.” 

Sabretasche laughed. 

“Yes, the world has a trick of serving, like the Swiss 
Guard and the secret police, whichever side is uppermost 
and pays them best. However, thank Heaven I want 
nothing of it, and it is very civil to me.” 

“ Because you want nothing of it V 
“Precisely.” 


II. 


THE “CHARMED LIFE” COMES BACK AMONG US. 

‘’Thank God I have found a girl who has some notion 
of conversation. I believe with the Persians that ten 
measures of talk were sent down from heaven, and the 
ladies took nine ; but of conversation, argument, repartee — 
the real use of that most faciie, dextrous, sharp-pointed 
weapon, the tongue — what woman has a notion? They 
employ a thousand superlatives in describing a dress, they 


190 


GRANVILLE DE VI ONE. 


exhaust a million expletives in damning their losom friend, 
their boudoirs hear more twaddle than the Commons — 
si c’est possible — and they rail harder over their coffee- 
cups at their sisters’ shortcomings than a popular preacher 
over his sounding-board at the vices he pets suh rosd. 
But as for conversation, they have not a notion of it; if 
you begin an argument, they either get into a passion or 
subside into monosyllables. If you chat with them at a 
ball, the silly ones will rattle you to death on the score of 
fashion, new hobbies, fresh scandals, and the most strictly 
private on dits ; the clever ones will knock you down with 
a ‘decided opinion,’ and so bewilder your mind with 
Greek roots, graptolites, modern economics, or Silurian 
strata, that you feel humbled into the lowest depths of your 
bottes vernies, and cut bas blues for the rest of your exist- 
ence ; and if you chance, which it is ten to one you do, on 
the simple ingenues, they drive you distracted by their Yes 
and their No, their measured-out enthusiasms, a wine- 
glassful for Jenny Lind, a tumblerful for Tennyson, and a 
good pint for the Exeter Hall meetings. A woman who 
has good conversation is as rare as one who does not care 
for scandal. I have met them occasionally in Paris salons, 
and we have found one to-day.” 

So spoke Sabretasche at mess that night apropos of 
Yiolet Molyneux, who was under discussion in common 
with our ox-tail and our wine. 

“Then you allow her the croix d’honneur of your ap- 
proval, Colonel,” said Moutressor, of Ours. 

“Certainly I do,” said Sabretasche. “This soup is not 
good, it is too thin. She is exquisitely pretty, even through 
“y eye-glass, which has a sad knack of finding the lilies 
cosmetique and the eyebrows tinting, and, what is much 
better, she is actually natural and fresh, and can talk as if 
Nature had given her brains and reading had cultivated 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


191 


them. I dare say they count on her making a good mar- 
riage.” 

“No doubt they do. Jockey Jack has hardly a rap, and 
is as poor for a peer as I should be for a professional 
beggar — the richest chaps going,” replied another man— 
Snaffle Pigott, (we called him Snaffle, after a match he 
won driving from Hounslow to Knightsbridge Mews.) 
“They can’t keep up their Irish place — Corallyne, isn’t it 
called ? — so they hang out in town three parts of the year, 
and take a shooting-box, or visit about for the rest. Con- 
found it, I wouldn’t be one of the Upper House, without a 
good pot of money to keep up my dignity, for anything I 
could see. Yiolet came out last season, you know?” 

“Yes, I know; I remember hearing she made a great 
sensation,” answered the Colonel. “Jack Ormsby and 
Allington told me she was the best thing of the season — 
the first, by-the-by, I was ever out of London. Lady 
Molyneux must try to run down Regalia or Cavendish 
Grey, or one of the great matrimonial coups. My lady 
knows how to manoeuvre, too; I wonder she should have a 
daughter so frank and unaffected.” 

“They’ve seen nothing of one another,” answered Pigott, 
who always knew everything about everybody, from the 
price Lord Goodwood gave for his thorough-bred roan 
fillies, to the private thoughts that Lady Honoria Bando- 
line wrote each night in her violet velvet diary. “My 
lady’s always running out somewhere; if you were to call 
at eight in the morning you’d find her gone off to early 
matins; if you were to call at twelve, she’d be off to the 
Sanctified and Born-again Clear-starchers’ jubilee with 
Lord Savinggrace ; at two, she’d be closeted and lunch- 
ing with her spiritual master — whoever he chanced to be 
—who gives her confession and takes croquis and Amon- 
tillado en meme temps; at three, she’d be having a snug 


192 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


boudoir flirtation ; at four, she’d be in the Park, of course, 
or at a morning concert ; at six, she’d be dressing for din- 
ner; at ten, she’d be off to three or four soirees musicales, 
balls, and crushes; and so between the two she certainly 
carries out that delightful work, ‘ How to Make the Best 
of Both Worlds,’ which my Low Church sister sent me the 
other day.” 

“With the idea that you were doing your very utmost 
<0 make the worst of ’em, Charlie?” laughed Sabretasche. 
^ I don’t know the volume — Heaven forefend ! — but the title 
sounds to me sneaky, as if it wanted to get the sweets out 
of both, yet compromise itself with neither. Your sketch 
of Lady Molyneux is as true to life as one of Leech^'s deli- 
cious sketches of character, but certainly her child is abouA 
as unlike her as could possibly be imagined.” 

“Oh, by George! yes,” assented Montressor, heartily; 
“Miss Yy hasn’t one bit of nonsense about her.” 

“And she’s a divine waltzer,” added Stafford Gore; 
“turn her round in a nutshell.” 

“And can’t she ride, just!” broke in little Fan, just 
joined. 

‘A^d her voice smashes Alboni’s to pieces — her shake’s 
perfection,” cried Telfer, a bit of a dilettante, and a com- 
pop<»r in a small way for the flute. 

“And — she can talk!” said Sabretasche, in his quiet 
voice, so low and gentle after the other fellows. “ I will 
call in Lowndes Square to-morrow. I say, so the — th is 
ordered home. We shall see De Yigne home again.” 

• “Unless he exchange to a regiment still on active ser- 
vice,” said Pigott. 

“He won’t do that,” I answered. “I heard from him 
last Marseilles mail, and he said that as his troop was 
ordered to England, he intended to return overland. Poor 
dear old fellow ! what ages it is since we’ve seen him !” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


i93 


“It is eight years, isn’t it?” said Sabretasche, setting 
down his champagne-glass with half a sigh. “He has 
had some sharp work out there. I hope it has done him 
good. I never wish to see a man look as he looked last 
time I saw him.” 

“Where’s his rascally wife I” asked Montressor. 

“The Trefusis? For Heaven’s sake don’t call her his 
wife,” said I, impatiently. “ I’ll never give her his name, 
though the law may — she-devil that she is. She is at 
Paris, cut by all our set, of course, but living with her 
antique Mephistopheles the Fantyre, in part of a dashing 
hotel in the Champs Elysees, keeping a green and gold 
chasseur six feet high, and giving very suivies soirees to a 
certain class of untitled English and titled French, who 
don’t care a fig for her story, and care a good deal for her 
suppers.” 

“Which she buys with De Vigne’s tin, hang her I” swore 
Montressor. “She calls herself Mrs. De Yigne, I sup- 
pose ?” 

“She is Mrs. De Yigne,” said Sabretasche, with that 
bitter sneer which occasionally passed over his delicate, 
impassive features. “You forget the sanctity, solemnity, 
and beauty of the marriage tie, my dear Montressor. You 
know it is too ‘holy’ to be severed, either by reason, justice, 
or common sense.” 

“Holy fiddlesticks I” retorted Montressor, contemptu- 
ously; “tlie best law for that confounded woman would 
have been Lynch law, and if I’d had my way, I would have 
taken her out of church that morning and shot her straight 
away out of hand,” 

“Too handsome to be shot, Fred,” said Pigott; “if 
she’d been an ugly woman, I would say yes, but there are 
too few faces like that to rid the earth of them.” 

“She will not be so handsome in a few years; she will 
17 « 


VOL. I. 


194 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


soon grow coarse,” said the Colonel, that most fastidious 
of female critics. “ She is the full-blown dashing style to 
strike you youngsters, and send you mad about her, but 
there is not in her face a single charm that will Zas/.” 

“Are there in any?” cried Pigott. “None last long with 
you. Colonel, I fancy?” 

Sabretasche laughed gayly. 

“ To be sure not 1 ^ 

Therefore is love said to be a child, 

Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. 

Don’t you admit the truth of that ? ” 

“I should hope I do. Well, after all, his marriage 
won’t matter dreadfully to De Yigne, except the loss of 
the three thousand pounds a year he allows her to make 
her keep on the Continent; though, to be sure, there’s the 
blow to his pride, and he is a terribly proud fellow.” 

Sabretasche looked up. “Some men’s honor is sensi- 
tive, Pigott; others — like their understandings — somewhat 
dull.” 

Pigott did not relish it; his fastidiousness was not as 
delicate as the Colonel’s or De Yigne’s, and his gift of 
brains as small as ever passed a man through Sandhurst, 
about the minimum, I should say, of mortal intelligence. 

“Well, why did he do it? He needn’t have been such 
a fool I” he said, sulkily. 

Sabretasche’s soft, mournful eyes lit up angrily. 

“If you are never more of a fool, Pigott, than Do 
Yigne, you may thank Heaven I His generosity and 
nobility of nature were deceived and wronged, and his 
hot passions led him into an error of judgment which 
will darken all his life ; but if every man I know were as 
worthy respect and admiration as he, the world would be 
a better one, and 7, at least, will never sit by to bsai him 
ridiculed.” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


195 


Those were very strong words from our gay, careless, 
laissez-faire, impassive, indolent Colonel, and they had 
their effect accordingly. He spoke very quietly — not 
raising his voice; but Pigott cared to provoke him no 
further. He drank down his sherry with rather a nervous 
laugh. 

“ Oh I we all know he’s a brick, and all I hope is, that 
he won’t come home and tumble into love with Violet 
Molyneux, or some other young filly.” 

Sabretasche laughed; he hated dissensions, and was 
always ready to restore harmony to any table. 

“I hope not, too. That young Irish beauty is exceed- 
ingly love-provoking. She has done a good deal of 
damage, hasn’t she ?” 

Six weeks or so after our Woolwich review, I was dining 
with Sabretasche at his own house — one of those charm- 
ing exclusive little dinner parties where he invited first-rate 
wits to partake of first-rate wines, and where every one, 
even the most blase, was perforce amused and pleased. 
The other men had just left, (all men celebrated for talent 
and ton, for the entree to Sabretasche’s house was as diffi- 
cult as a pass to Almack’s, when Almack’s was in iud prime,) 
and the Colonel and I were sitting before the inner draw- 
ing-room fire with the Cid stretched on the rug between 
us; Sabretasche lying full length on a sofa inhaling per- 
fume from his luxurious hookah, and I in a low chair 
smoking a Manilla. Why the Colonel was so kind to me, 
and talked so much to me, when he had all the best men 
in town at his command, I must leave. I never did un- 
derstand it, and never shall. I think it was, first, my being 
honest and fresh to life that he liked ; and afterward, prob- 
ably, our mutual attachment to, and sorrow for, De Vigne, 
gave us something in common. We were talking of him to- 
night, for the — th had been ordered home, and he coming 


196 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


by himself, via Marseilles, was expected in a few days at 
furthest. 

“What a sin it is that such a union should be valid, 
said Sabretasche. “I think I hear that wretched woman 
tell me, with her cold triumphant smile, ‘Colonel Sabre- 
tasche, my father’s name was Trefusis, my mother’s name 
was Davis — one was a gentleman, the other a beggar-girl. 
I have as much or as little right to one as to the other. 
Let your friend sue for a divorce, the law will not give it 
him.’” 

“ Too true ; the law will not. Our divorce law is — ” 

“An inefficient, insufficient, cruel farce,” said Sabre- 
tasche, more energetically than I had ever heard him say 
anything in his life. “In an infatuated hour a man sad- 
dles himself with a she-devil like the Trefusis — a liar, a 
drunkard, a mad woman ; what redress is there for him ? 
None. All his life through he must drag on the same 
clog ; fettering all his energies, crushing out all his hopes, 
chaining down his very life, festering at his very heart- 
strings. There, at his hearth, must sit the embodied curse 
— there, in his home, it must dwell — there, at his side, it 
must be, till God release him from it I” 

I looked up at him in surprise, it was so very unusual to 
see him so warm about anything. He took up his hookah 
again and pointed to a marble statuette — one of his own 
chipping, by the way — on which the fire-light was gleaming. 

“Look at that little Yenus Anadyomene, Arthur, with 
the fire-light shining on her; quite Rembrandtesque, isn’t 
it? I’ll paint it so to-morrow.” 

“Do, and give the picture to Yiolet Molyneux. But 
apropos of your remarks, how would you redress the divorce 
shortcomings ? If you divorce for insanity, every husband 
sick of his wife can get a certificate of lunacy against her 
If for drunkenness, what woman will be safe from having 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


191 


drams innumerable sworn against her? If for incompati- 
bility of temper, after every little temporary quarrel scores 
would fly to the divorce courts, and be heartily sorry for it 
after. Come, how would you redress it?” 

“My dear fellow,” said Sabretasche, languidly, “I’m not 
in parliament, thank Heaven for it; for, if I were, my con- 
S(;ience would be always pricking me to try and introduce 
a little liberal feeling and common sense among that body 
and, as the operation would be of an Augean-stable char- 
acter, I’m much too idle a man for it to be to my taste. 
You talk like a sage. 1 only feel — for poor De Yigne, I 
mean.” 

“You don’t feel more for him than I, Colonel, and 
though it isn’t the thing to execute corporeal punishment 
on ladies, I should have more delight in kicking that 
miserable, hateful Jezabel of a woman within an inch of 
her life, than any rapture you could bestow on me. That 
such a union should be legal is a disgrace to any country. 
At the same time, divorce seems to me, of all the niceties 
of legislature, the most ticklish and unsatisfactory to adjust. 
If you were to shut the door on divorce, there is an evil 
unbearable ; if you open it too wide, almost as much harm 
may accrue. Divorces are a necessity of common sense 
and common peace, yet there is some sense in it, that if it 
be made so easy that in twelve months’ time, when their 
fancy is faded, people can break their chains and leave one 
another at their will, marriage will be no longer any union 
of heart and mind, but a mere social compact, without 
interest or solemnity, and men will take a wife as they buy 
a horse, to turn it over to some other possessor and buy 
another that they fancy better.” 

“ My dear Chevasney, you talk like a paterfamilias, a 
Solon of seventy, a moral machine without blood, or bones, 
or feelings,” said Sabretasche, impatiently. “I don’t care. 

17 * 


198 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


a straw for theories, I look at facts. Put yourself in the 
position, Arthur, and then sit in judgment. I take it if 
every man had to do that, the laws would be at once wiser 
and more lenient; whereas now, on the contrary, it is your 
man who has the stolen pieces in his pocket who cries out 
the most vehemently for the thief to be hanged, hoping to 
throw off suspicion. Put yourself in the position 1 Now 
you are young and easily swayed, you fall in love — as you 
phrase it — with some fine figure or pretty face. Down 
you go headlong, never stopping to consider whether her 
mind is attuned to yours, her tastes in common with yours, 
her character such as will go well with yours in the long 
intercourse that takes so much to make it harmony, so little 
to make it discord. You marry her; the honeymoon is 
barely out before the bandage is off your eyes. We will 
suppose you see your wife in her true colors — coarse, per- 
haps low-bred, with not a fiber of her moral nature that is 
attuned to yours, not a chord in heart or mind that is in 
harmony with yours. She revolts all your better tastes, 
she checks all your warmer feelings, she debases all your 
higher instincts ; union with her humbles you in your own 
eyes ; contact and association with her lower your tone of 
thought, and imperceptibly draw you down to her own 
level. Your home is one ceaseless scene of pitiful jangle 
or of coarser violence. She makes your house a hell, she 
peoples your hearth with fiends; she and her children 
— hideous likenesses of herself — bear your own name, and 
make you loathe it. Perhaps you meet one the utter con- 
trast of her, the fond ideal in your youth of what your 
wife was to be, one who touches all the better springs, all 
the higher aspirations ; one in whom you realize all you 
might have been, all you might have done I You look on 
Heaven, and devils hold you back. You thirst for a 
higher, purer, more ennobling life, and fiends mock at you 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


199 


and will not let you reach it. What escape is there for 
you? None but the grave! Realize this — realize \i in 
all its hideous force — and you will feel how, as a prisoner 
lies dying for the scent of the free fresh air, while the free 
man sits contentedly within, so a man, happily married or 
not married at all, looks on the question of divorce in a 
very different light to a man fettered thus, with the tor- 
ments of both Prometheus and Tantalus, the vulture gnaw- 
ing at his vitals, the lost joys mocking him out of reach !” 

His indolence was gone, his impassiveness changed to 
vivid earnestness; his melancholy eyes grew more mourn- 
ful still, and there was a cadence in his voice, a powerful 
pathos, which held one spell-bound. I shuddered in- 
voluntarily. 

“You draw a terrible picture. Colonel, and a true 
enough one, no doubt, as many men would witness if one 
could see into their homes and hearts. But what I want 
to know is, how to redress it ? What Sir Cresswell Cress- 
well ever would, or ever could, dive into the hidden mys- 
teries of human life, the unuttered secrets of mutual love 
or mutual hate ? What judge could say where the blame 
lay ; or, seeing only the surface, and hearing only the out- 
side, weigh the just points of harmony or incompatibility, 
fitness or unfitness ? Who can decide between man and 
woman? Who, seeing the little of the inner existence 
that is ever revealed in a law court, could judge between 
them ? God knows, it is an awful thing for a man’s life to 
be cursed by a mistake of judgment, a lack of penetration, 
a boyish madness, a momentary passion ; cursed, as you 
say, to the grave. For no fault he incurs a hideous punish- 
ment. But how redress it? We know how mischievously 
absurd the divorce mania was in Germany ? How Doro- 
thea Yeit broke with the best of husbands, on the plea of 
want of ‘sympathy,’ and went over to Frederick Schlegcl; 


200 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and how the Sensitive doctrine of which Schleiermacher 
was inaugurator, made it only necessary to be tied, to feel 
the want of being ‘sympathetically matched,’ and being 
untied again. There are, doubtless, many nobie-minded, 
passionate-hearted, high-arabitioned men, whom it is a sin 
and an agony not to divorce at once from the woman 
chosen in an ill-judged and hasty moment, whose very lacK 
of harmony is more torture to his fine-strung nature than 
far greater miseries to coarser minds. Bui, again, there 
are men far more numerous than they who would make it 
an excuse for their own inconstancy; who would marry 
then as carelessly as they flirt now, and would, as soon as 
a pretty face had grown stale to their eye, find out inat 
she was a vixen, a virago, addicted to g'in, or anything 
that suited their purpose, though she migiit really have 
every virtue under heaven. Don’t you think that it is im- 
possible, as long as human nature is so wayward, change- 
able, and short-sighted, or marriage numbered among our 
social institutions at all, to trim — as Halifax calls it — 
between too much liberty in it and too little?” 

“Hush, hush, my good Arthur 1” cried the Colonel, with 
a gesture of deprecation; “pray keep all that for the 
benches of St. Stephen’s some twenty years hence; it is 
far too chill, sage, and rational for me to appreciate it. 
I prefer feeling to reasoning — always have done. Possibly, 
the evils might accrue that you prophesy so mathematically, 
but that does not at all disprove what I say, that the mar- 
riage fetters of Church and law are at times the heaviest 
handcuffs men can wear, heavier than those that chain the 
galley slave to his oar, for he has committed crime to 
justify his punishment, whereas a man tricked into mar- 
riage by an artful intrigante, or hurried into it by a mad 
fancy, has done no harm to any one — except himself. Il 
you have such a taste for reason, listen to what John 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


201 


Milton — that ^Tave, calm Puritan and philosophic repub- 
lican, the last man in the universe to let his passions run 
away with him — says on the score.” He stretched out his 
hand to a stand of books near him, and took out a Tetra- 
chordon, bound, as all his books were, in cream-colored 
vellum and gold. “Hear what John Milton says : ‘Him 
I hold more in the way to perfection who foregoes an im- 
pious, ungodly, and discordant wedlock, to live according 
to peace, and love, and God’s institution in a fitter choice ; 
than he who debars himself the happy experience of all 
godly, which is peaceful conversation in his family, to live 
a contentious and unchristian life not to be avoided; in 
temptations not to be lived in; only for the false keeping 
of a most unreal nullity, a marriage that hath no affinity 
with God’s intentions, a daring phantasm, a mere toy of 
terror ; awing weak senses, to the lamentable superstition 
of ruining themselves, the remedy whereof God in his 
law vouchsafes us ; which, not to dare use, he warranting, 
is not our perfection, but is our infirmity, our little faith, 
our timorous and low conceit of charity, and in them who 
force us to it, is their masking pride and vanity to seem 
holier and more circumspect than God.’ What do you 
say now ? Can you deny the justice, the wisdom, the wide 
charity and reason of his arguments? It is true he was 
unhappy with his wife, but he was a man to speak, not from 
passion, but from conviction. Milton was made of that 
stern stuff that would cut off your right hand if it offended 
you. In Rome he would have been a Yirginius, a Cincin- 
natus; in the early Christians’ days, he would have died 
with Stephen, endured with Paul. He is not a man like 
myself, who do no earthly good that I know of, who am 
swayed by impulse, imagination, passion — a hundred thou- 
sand things, who have never checked a wish or denied a 
desire, and who live simply pour m’amuser. Milton is one 


202 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


of your saints and heroes, yet even he has the compassion- 
ate wisdom to see that divorce would save many a man 
whom an unfit union drives headlong to his ruin. He 
knows that it is cowardice and hypocrisy, and, as he says, 
a wish to seem holier and more circumspect than God, 
which makes your nineteenth century precisians forbid 
what nature and reason, the inborn bias and the acquired 
knowledge of human beings alike demand, and to which, if 
the Church and the law courts forbade freedom ever so, they 
would find some means to pioneer their own way. You 
may cage an eagle out of the sunlight, but the bird will 
find some road to life, and light, and liberty, or die beating 
his wings in hopeless effort. — Look there I Good Heavens, 
there is He Vigne I” 

I sprang up ; he rose very quickly for his usual indolent 
movements. In the doorway stood De Vigne, and we 
grasped his hands silently, none of us speaking for some 
minutes. The memory of that last scene in the church at 
Vigne was strong upon us all, and I, God bless him I loved 
his face too well to look on it again quite calmly after eight 
years’ absence. 

Then Sabretasche put his hand on his shoulder, and 
pushed him gently into an arm-chair before the fire, and 
said, softly and fondly as a man speaks to a woman, — 

“Dear old fellow I there is no need for us to say welcome 
home 1” 

De Vigne looked up with something of his old, frank, 
cordial, sunny smile, though it faded almost instantly. 

“No need, indeed; and don't say it. I know you are 
both glad to see me, and let us forget that we have ever 
been separated. Arthur, old boy, if it wouldn’t sound an 
insult, I should tell you you were grown; and as for you, 
Sabretasche, you are not a whit altered; it is my belief 
you wouldn’t change if you lived as long as Sue’s Wan- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


203 


dering Jew. They told me at the barracks Arthur was 
dining with yoU, and so I came on straight. My luggage 
is still in the Pera, but I brought up some cheroots worth 
a guinea a piece, I vow. Try them, both of you. Ah, 
how I have wanted you two and the Dashers out in 
Scinde. You would have enjoyed it, Arthur, and I believe 
Sabretasche himself would have found a new sensation.” 

We saw that he wished to sweep away the past, and 
avoid all allusion to his own fate, and we fell in with his 
humor. Lounging and smoking round the fire, we tried 
to ignore every painful subject ; though as I looked at him 
I found it hard work not to utter aloud a curse on the 
woman who had sent him into exile. 

Those eight years had not passed without leaving their 
stamp upon him. His face had lost the glow, the bright 
eagerness, the rounded outline of his earlier youth : but to 
me, at least, it had a far higher beauty, the beauty of ex- 
perience and reflection. Pale he had always been, but now 
the pallor was that of marble, as if the hot young blood 
surging through his veins had been suddenly frozen, as 
when the first breath of winter checks the free, warm, ve- 
hement waters in their course, and chills them into ice. 
The climate had hardly bronzed him at all, and his wide, 
white forehead was without scar or mark. The always 
severely delicate outline of his profile was still more clearly 
chiseled ; his mouth was now haughty and stern ; his pas- 
sionate dark eyes were now searching, calm, and generally 
refusing all guess at the thoughts or feelings within, and 
the dark shadow under them, with a line or two about his 
lips which his black, silky moustaches did not hide, spoke 
of his restless spirit and unquiet fate. It was the face of 
a man of wayward will and strong passions, but of way- 
wardness that had cost him dear, and of passions that were 
chained down and iced perhaps forever. 


204 


GRANVILLE DE ^^aNE. 


“You have seen good service out there, De Yigne,” 
began Sabretasche, to lighten the gloom which malgr6 
nous was stealing upon us. “Ton my word we feel quite 
proud of you. What a lion you have been, old fellow. 
We grudged you intensely to the Hussars.” 

He Vigne smiled. 

“I looked a lion because I was among puppy dogs, Sa- 
bretasche. Yes, I saw good service, not so much, though, 
as I should have liked. Some of it was pretty sharp work, 
but we dawdled a whole year away at that little miserable 
Calcutta court; if it had not been for pig-sticking and the 
tigers I should never have borne it at all, but I got no end 
of spears, and I found sport in the jungles a good deal 
more like the real thing than in the preserves here, or even 
on the moors. Then we went up to a hill station, where 
there was nobody but an old judge, purblind, and a mis- 
sionary or two, who had been bankrupt shoemakers or 
stonemasons, and taken to dispensing grace as a means of 
getting a few shillings from those discerning Christians 
who sent them out, firmly crediting their assurances that 
they feel ‘specially called.’ There the hill deer, and the 
ortolans, and a tiger or two, kept us going; and then we 
were ordered off to have a shy at the mountain rebels, and 
a pleasant lif 5 we led, hunting them. They fought magnifi- 
cently, I must say. Ah I by Jove!” cried De Yigne, his 
eyes lighting up, “there at last I really lived. The con- 
stant presence of danger, the ceaseless necessity for vigi- 
lance, the free life, the sharp service, roused me up, and 
gave me a zest for existenee which 1 thought I had lost 
forever.” 

“Nonsense, nonsense!” cried the Colonel. “You will 
have zest enough in it by-and-by. No man on the sunny 
side of forty has lost what he may not regain.” 

“Except where one false step has murdered pride and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2C5 


periled honor, has clouded all the future, formed a barrier 
which there is no destroying, a clog which there is no cast- 
ing from us,” said De "V’ igne, with something of that stern 
sadness which he had tried to throw off him. But he 
roused himself again. “ Well, Sabretasche, what have you 
been doing all these years ? Flirting, buying pictures and 
painting them, setting the fashion, and criticising new 
singers, as usual, I suppose.” 

“Don’t talk of the years!” cried Sabretasche, lifting his 
eyebrows. “If I see to-moiTow I shall be nine-and-thirty. 
It is disagreeable to grow old; one begins to doubt one’s 
attractions.” 

“You are young enough,” laughed De Vigne ; “ and yet, 
I don’t know, it is a popular fallacy that time counts by 
years. One is old according to the style of one’s life, not 
the length of it.” 

“I heard Violet Molyneux tell you last night, Coionel, 
that you were in your second youth, and the first prime of 
manhood. So take comfort,” said I, laughing. 

He smiled too. 

“Poor little fool!” he muttered, under his moustaches. 

“Violet Molyneux — who is she?” asked De Vigne. 
“That’s a new name to me. Is she a child of Lord Moly- 
neux — Jockey Jack, as we used to call him?” 

“Yes,” I answered; “and a lovely creature she is. 
She’s a fresh beauty, and a new love for Sabretasche, who, 
from a few calls from him, and a few books from his library, 
and a few canters down the Ride with him, is ready to 
think him perfection, and worships him most devoutly, es- 
pecially since she came to his studio with her mamma this 
morning and saw his last painting — which you must see, 
by the way — of Esmeralda and Djali.” 

“Don’t crack me up, Arthur,” said Sabretasche, rather 
impatiently. “Jockey Jack has a daughter who knows 

VOL. I. 18 


S06 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


how to talk, and sings well enough to please me, (two 
especial miracles, as you can fancy, my dear De Yigne;) 
but, certainly, both her tongue and her thorax do their 
business unusually well, and she is very lovely to boot. 
What have I been doing, did you say ? Leading just the 
same life I have led for the last eighteen or twenty years. 
Making love to scores of women and loving none, wasting 
my time over marble and canvas, heading a Hyde Park 
campaign, or directing a Richmond fete. Caramba! one 
gets tired of it.” 

“Why lead it, then ?” 

“Because none are any better. Do my scientific friends, 
who absorb their energies in classifying a fossil, encrinite ; 
my parliamentary friends, who concentrate their energies 
in bribing the Unwashed; my philanthropic friends, who 
hoax the public, and get hoaxed themselves by every text- 
quoting thief who has the knack and the tact to touch up 
their weak points; my literary friends, who write to line 
portmanteaus ; my celebrated friends, who work, and wear, 
and toil to get heart disease and three lines in history, — 
do these, any of them, enjoy themselves one whit the more; 
or fail to say with Solomon, ‘Vanity of vanities — all is 
vanity’? Tell me so — show me so, and I will begin their 
life to-morrow. Our vocation is to amuse ourselves, and 
slay our fellow-creatures by way of intermediate pastime ; 
and it is as good a one, for all I can see, as any other.” 

“ To slay our fellow-creatures I” cried De Yigne. “ Come, 
come, put it a little more gracefully. To fight like Britons 
— to die for our colors. Something a little more poetic 
and patriotic.” 

“ Same thing, my dear De Yigne ; only the wording 
different I” 

“You like the same life as the Cid, Colonel,” said I, 
smiling. “To eat daintily, sleep warmly, lie on cushions 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2o: 

writhout anybody to trouble you, and kill your game when 
the spirit moves you.” 

“And love most truly, and do my duty, as far as I see 
It, most faithfully? No, no, Arthur, that doesn’t do for 
me at all; it’s not in my role.” 

“You’ll write on the Cid’s grave,” said De Yigne, “as 
Byron on Boatswain’s, 

In life the firmest friend, 

The first to welcome, foremost to defend.” 

“Yes, indeed; and like him I may add: 

I never had but one, and here he lies. 

The Cid,” said Sabretasche, drawing the dog’s ears through 
his hands — “the Cid is the only thing that cares for me.” 

“For you, the adored of all women, the cher ami of all 
beauties, the ‘good fellow’ of every man worth knowing in 
town I” said De Vigne. “What do you mean by only 
having a dog to care for you ? The world would never 
believe you.” 

“I mean what I say,” answered Sabretasche. “Bon 
Dieu I how much does the world know of any of us ?” 

“Little enough,” said De Vigne, “but it is always of 
those of whom it knows least that it will affect to know 
most; and the stranger you sit next at a dinner-party is 
ten to one far better acquainted with your business than 
you are yourself.” 

“Ah I isn’t he?” said I. “That reminds me, Sabre- 
tasche, I heard from three different ladies the other day 
that you were engaged to Valencia Prie-Dieu, that you 
were certainly going to be married to Fanella de Vaux; 
and thirdly, that you, without the slightest doubt, were 
going to elope with Ascott’s wife. I believe they men- 
tioned the hour, and where you were going.” 


208 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Well done for your morals, Sabretasche,’^ laughed Do 
Vigiie; “three women on your hands at the same time I 
How will you manage them all?” 

“Good Heavens!” cried the Colonel, laughing. “Com- 
mend me to the ingenuity of women 1 With Val Prie-Dieu 
I danced twice at Almack’s, and that’s all, for she hasn’t 
two ideas, and I never waste my time on a stupid woman ; 
no coiffure can make up to me for lack of brain under it. 
Miss de Yaux, I don’t think I kuow; I have- a dim recol- 
lection of staying last autumn in the same house with a 
hideous large-boned filly of a girl, who went by that name. 
With my Lady Ascott, I plead guilty to mild flirtation ; but, 
as she has red hair, is the most prudent of women, and 
Ascott is one of my best friends, and has many a time con- 
fided to me how thankful he would be to any Don Juan 
that rid him of his better-half, I should be about as likely 
to elope with your new mare. Fancy my supporting life, 
for a week only, in the proximity of red hair 1” 

“Then I may contradict the statements?” 

“No. I never honor reports by denying them.” 

“Quite right,” said De Yigne; “they die quickest of 
inanition. Feed them with denial, they thrive apace; 
neglect them, they perish of chagrin. We shall hear you 
are to marry — what is her name? — Violet Molyneux 
next ?” 

“Not I,” said Sabretasche; “at least you may hear it, 
but I shall live and die as 1 am now — alone !” 

‘ Who would care for reports ?” said De Vigne, breaking 
off the ash of his cheroot; “the whispers of idle raiscliief 
or industrious malice. For my part, I can as soon imagino 
a man taking heed of every tuft of dandelion that passes 
him in the air, or every petty insect that crawls beneath 
his feet, as taking note of the reports that buzz round his 
career. If they are false, of course he can afford to laugh 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


209 


at them ; if true, why the judgment of society is not so in 
fallible that we must needs bow to it, but, quite t;ie con- 
trary, it is most apt to err: it judges from the outside, in 
utter ignorance of the motive powers and springs within. 
The purity of a whitened sepulcher may attract it — the 
errors and weaknesses of a warm and noble nature may 
wdn its unjust censure. It is always ready to condemn, 
never ready to extenuate; and those whom it ostracizes 
are often worth the most. Opinion decreed Pavid and 
Brutus fools; Eldon a profligate; Columbus a dreamer 
and blasphemer; Leibnitz, Sheridan, Washington Irving, 
and a host of others, dunderheads. Report has never )et 
been a true index to merit; and I should as soon dream of 
heeding the purposeless buzz of flies on a midsummer day 
as the venom and gossip with which petty natures seek to 
sting *one. Bah ! how I hate all those petitesses and tur- 
moils, those pitiful wheels within wheels, those arrows, hit 
for so trifling a vengeance yet barbed with such a poison^'d 
head, those lowering jealousies and meannesses, that de- 
basing atmosphere of scandals, and envies, and detractions, 
that spoil social life. Out campaigning, one is free from 
all that. It is action, it is reality; before the cannon’s 
mouth men cannot stop to split straws; and with one’s 
own life on a thread, one cannot stop to stoop and ruin 
another’s character. I do not know how it is. I nave 
read pretty widely, but philosophers never preached endur- 
ance to me as well as the grand eternal calm of nature, nor 
sermons humbled me like the sense of my own insignificance 
as I lay under the great cathedral of the sky, with its mul- 
titudinous worlds rolling on and on in their changeless 
course. A few months ago I was camping out to net 
ortolans; the night was so still, so clear 1 What night is 
like a tropical one ! Round us was the dense stretch of 
the forests and jungles — no wind stirring the great palm 

18 * o 


310 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


groves — no sound, except the cry of the hill deer, or the 
deep voice of a tiger far away — there was nothing stirring, 
except now and then an antelope flitting like a ghost across 
the clearing, and, over it all, those dark blue skies with the 
intense brilliance of the southern stars. On my life, as I 
lay there by our watch-fire alone, with my pipe, it struck 
me that, if we would let her. Nature would be a truer 
teacher than theories or homilies. Human life seems so 
small beside the vast life of universal creation. The calm 
grand silence of the worlds going on in their noiseless path 
rebukes our own feverishness, our fretful passions, our am- 
bitions, so arrogant, and yet so petty. We who fancy that 
the eyes of all the universe are on us, that we are the sole 
love and charge of its Creator, feel what ephemera we are 
in the giant scale of existence ; what countless myriads of 
such as we have been swept from their place out of sight, 
and not a law of the spheres around been stirred, not a 
moment’s pause been caused in the silent march of crea- 
tion. Under men’s tutelage I grow impatient and irri- 
tated. What gage have I that they know one bit better 
than I ? They rouse me into questioning their dogmas, 
into penetrating their mysteries, into searching out and 
proving the nullity of the truths they assume for granted; 
but under the tfeaching of Nature I am silent. I recog- 
nize my own inferiority. I grow ashamed of my own 
weaknesses, my pride, my lack of charity and tolerance 
Have not you often felt the same ?” 

“Yes,” answered Sabretasche. “A wayside flower, a 
sunny savanna, a rose-hued Mediterranean sunrise, even 
a little bit of lichen on a stone in the Campagna, has taught 
one truer lessons than are taught in the forum or the pulpit. 
Man sees so little of his fellow-man ; he is so ready to con- 
demn, so slow to sympathize with him, that, if he attempt 
to teach, he is far more apt to irritate than aid ; whereas,^ 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


211 


to the voices of flowers, and sunlight, and midnight stars^ 
the bluntest sense can hardly fail to listen, and they speak 
in a universal tongue, whose cadence is translatable alike 
to the Indian in his primeval woods and the civilized 
savant in his scientific study.” 

“But one is apt to lose sight of Nature in the hurry 
and conflict of actual every-day social life. Standing 
alone under the shadow of the Alps, a man learns and 
feels his own utter insignificance; but back again in the 
world, the first line of a favorable review, the first hurrah 
of an admiring constituency, the first applause that feeds 
his ear in the world he lives in, will give him back his self- 
appreciation, and he will find it hard not to take himself 
at the high gauge that others take him, and not to fancy 
himself of the importance to the universe that he naturally 
is to the clique to which he belongs. That is partly why 
I was unwilling to leave campaigning. There the jungle 
and the stars took me in hand, and there, many a night by 
my camp-fire, with my cheroot or my pipe in my mouth, I 
would listen to them, though God knows whether I am the 
better for it. Here, on the contrary, men will be prating 
at me, and I shall chafe at them, and it will be a wonder 
if I do not kick out at some of them. I am impatient, 
you know; my guerrilla life suited me better than my 
fashionable one.” 

“You are too good for it all the same,” said Sabretasche ; 
“and if you should put the kicking process into execution, 
it will be a little wholesome chastisement for them, and a 
little sanitary exertion for you. Jungles and planets are 
grander and truer, sans doute, but Johannisberger and 
society are equally good for men in their way, and, besides 
— they are very pleasant I” 

“Your acme of praise, Sabretasche,” laughed He Yigne. 
agree with you that human nature is, after all, the best 


212 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


book we can learn, only the study is irritating, and one 
sees so much en noir there, that if we look too long we are 
apt to spoil our eyes for daylight, or to fling away our 
lexicon, with a curse upon it for deceiving us.” 

“The best way, after all,” said* the Colonel, with a cross 
between a yawn and a sigh, “is not to take it au serienx, 
or make anything a study. Men and women are marion- 
ettes; the best way is to learn the tricks of their wires 
and strings, and make them perform, at our will, tragedy, 
comedy, farce, whatever pleases our mood. To be sure, 
one sometimes has a penalty to pay for learning to manage 
the puppets, as Charles Nodier found when he was taught 
to make Polichinelle talk upon the Boulevards; but human 
life is a kaleidoscope, with which the wise man amuses him- 
self ; it has pretty pictures for the eye, if you know how 
to shake them up, and as for analyzing it, pulling it to 
pieces for being only bits of cork and burnt glass, and 
quarreling with it for being trumpery instead of bona fide 
brilliants — cui bono ? — you won’t make it any better.” 

“Possibly; but I shall not be taken in by it.” 

“My dear fellow, I think the time when we are taken in 
by it is the happiest part of our lives.” 

“Maybe. His drum is no pleasure to a boy after he 
has broken it, and found the music is empty wind, with no 
mystery about it whatever. I say, what is your clock? 
Am I not keeping you fellows from some engagement or 
other ?” 

“None at all,” answered Sabretasche, “and you will 
just sit where you are for the next four hours. Give me 
another cheroot, and take some more cognac : it is the 
true thing ; I brought it from France myself. Is it likely 
we shall let you off early after an eight years’ absence ?” 

We did not let him off early; and all the small hours 
had chimed before we had done talking over our cheroots, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


213 


with the fire burning brightly in the Colonel’s luxurious 
room, and the Cid lying full-length between us, with his 
muzzle between his fore-pads, while De Yigne told us tales 
of his Indian campaign that roused even tired and listless 
Sabretasche, and tired my blood like the war-note of Boot 
and the Long Roll, or the trumpet-call of Saddle 1 


PART THE EIGHTH. 

I. 


SABRETASCHE, HAVING MOWED DOWN MANY FLOWERS, DE- 
TERMINES TO SPARE ONE VIOLET. 

From the hour he left her in the vestry at Yigne church, 
I)e Yigne had never seen the woman who, by law, stood 
branded, as his wife. His fiery love changed into most 
bitter loathing, and the hate wherewith he hated her was 
far greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. 
How could it be otherwise ? How could any man so fiery 
in his impulses, so vehement in his passions, change to 
anything but deadliest hate toward the woman who had 
outwitted and entrapped him, outraged his honor, shivered 
his pride, insulted him so openly, revenged herself so 
cruelly, and shaped her vengeance in a form which would 
press upon him a dead and ice-cold weight to his grave — 
which would strike from his path all the natural joys and 
aspirations that bloom so brightly for a man so young, and 
stretch over his whole existence a shadow all the blacker 
that its giant upas-tree sprang from the forgotten seed of 
a boyish folly ? He left her at the church, and swore never 
to touch even her hand again. Passion changed to ab* 


214 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


horrence, and the girl who had charmed and intoxicated 
him in his boyhood with the simply sensuous beauties of 
face and form, filled him only with loathing and disgust 
when he thought of her bearing his own name, holding his 
own honor; when he saw her — coarse, cruel, ill born, ill 
bred, the pollution of her past life vainly covered with 
the varnish of society, the mud of the gutter gleaming 
hideously through the cosmetique of the actress ; the vul- 
gar vengefulness of her original nature standing out in its 
true colors; every taste of hers alien to his; every chord 
of her mind and thoughts at discord with liis own ; all the 
coarse attractions that had once charmed him so madly 
now revolting him from her; — and seeing her thus, knew 
that till one or other was in the grave this woman was his 
WIFE. Remorse, too, was added to the curse of his mar- 
riage. His mother, who loved him so tenderly, whom he 
loved so well — the one friend on whom he could rely, the 
one adviser in whom he, reserved and impatient of control, 
was alone able to confide — his mother had died of that 
fatal blow which struck at the root of her son’s peace and 
honor. She had been for some years a victim of heart 
disease, though she had never allowed De Vigne to be told 
of the frail tenure on which she held her life; that any 
sudden emotion or over-excitement might at any time be 
her death-blow, was only known to herself and her phy- 
sician, and she kept her secret with that silent heroism of 
which here and there women are found capable. As l)o 
Yigne left the church, Sabretasche lifted her up in what 
he believed to be a fainting fit, but it was a swoon, from 
which she never awoke, and her son was left to bear his 
curse alone. 

I have ‘seen men writhing in their death agony, I have 
seen women stretched across the lifeless body of their lover 
on the battle-field where he fell, I have seen the anguish 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


215 


and the torture of human souls cooped up by shoals in 
hospital sick- wards, I have seen mortal suffering in almost 
all its phases — and they are varied and pitiful enough, God 
knows ! — but I never saw any so silent and yet so terrible 
as De Vigne’s, when we hurried after him up to town to 
tell him of his double grief. When we found him, the 
Trefusis’s revenge had done its work upon him ; lengthened 
years would not have quenched the life, and light, and 
youth, as the remorse, the humiliation, the conflicting pas- 
sions at war within him had already done. The tidings 
we brought crowned the anguish that had entered into his 
life. On my life, gently as Sabretasche broke it to him, I 
thought it would have killed him. His lips turned gray 
as stone, he staggered like a drunken man, and would have 
fallen where he stood if I had not held him up. 

“My God I and I have murdered her!” — That was all 
he said. Under what anguish his strong heart reeled, and 
his iron pride bowed in his night watches beside the life- 
less form of the mother whose love for him had killed her, 
no one knew. lie was alone in his passionate and un- 
spoken sorrow, and I could only guess by my knowledge 
of him how bitterly his deep affections suffered, how wildly 
he cursed the wayward passions that had wrought his ruin, 
how long and silently the vulture of remorse gnawed his 
heart away, with the haunting memory of his folly and its 
fruit. 

He laid his mother under one of the giant elms of Yigne, 
with Violets and lilies growing over her pure white head- 
stone; and, but for the high courage and strong manhood 
in him, would have loaded one of his pistols and been 
buried there beside her, so bitter was his anguish art the 
mad, headstrong passion which had given the death-blow 
to her life and his own peace. 

A month afterward he exchanged into the — th Hussara 


216 


GRANVILLE DE V IGNE. 


and sailed for Scinde. He saw none of his old companions 
and acquaintance, save the Colonel and myself; he shunned 
all who had been witnesses of his marriage, all who knew 
of the stain upon his name, all who had even heard of the 
folly into which his own wayward will had hurried him. It 
is easy to bear the contempt and censure of the world when 
we are happy, and defiance of its laws brings fame or rap- 
ture; but its sneer and its supercilious smiles may be hard 
even to a brave man to bear, when the world has cause to 
call him fool, when it can triumph in vaunting its own 
superior penetration, in recalling its own wise prophecies 
of his fall, and in compelling him to make the most difficult 
of all confessions to a proud heart — “I was wrong!’’ 

De Vigne sailed for India, the hand of his double sorrow 
heavy upon him. He commissioned Sabretasche to make 
arrangements with the Trefusis, but all that the Colonel, 
consummate man of the world though he was, could do, 
was to exact that she should receive an allowance of three 
thousand a year, (if she would have demanded less, which 
I do not suppose she would, old Fantyre, who was eternally 
at her elbow, would not have permitted her,) on condition 
that she never came to England. The Trefusis accepted 
it, possibly because she knew the law would not give her 
so much, and went to Paris and the Bads, leading a pleas- 
ant life enough, I doubt not, but careful to make it far too 
proper a one — outwardly, at the least — to give him any 
chance of a divorce. Separated from him at the church, 
she was still legally his wife, and she printed “Mrs. De 
Yigne” on her cards, and held herself as such. By what 
miracle of metamorphosis, by what agency, assistance, or 
wonderful self-education Lucy Davis had been enabled to 
change herself into Constance Trefusis, we knew not then, 
nor till long afterward. That De Yigne had not recognized 
in the haughty and handsome protegee of Lady Fantyre 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


217 


the forward young milliner of Frestonhills, who had almost 
entirely slipped from his memory, was not astonishing 
In those eight years the unformed girl of seventeen had 
changed into the maturer and finer beauty of five-and- 
twenty ; she had grown taller, her form had developed, 
fashion, dress, and taste lent her beauty a thousand aids 
unknown to her in her earlier days of mingled boldness 
and gaucherie. It was not wonderful that, having for- 
gotten Lucy Davis, and almost all connected with her, in 
tlie rapid whirl of life into which he liad plunged, and the 
different loves which had chased themselves in and out of 
his wayward fancy, he should fail to recognize her as Con- 
stance Trefusis, in so utterly different a sphere, so e itirely 
altered in feature, manner, appearance, that not a single 
trace remained to recall her to him; though how she had 
so metamorphosed herself I used to think over in amaze- 
ment many and many a time, never able to find out a 
solution. 

De Vigne returned home to resume the social life he 
had so suddenly snapped asunder. To careless eyes he 
was much the same; as amusing a companion at the mess- 
table; as keen-sighted and witty a talker in that most 
fastidious of circles, the clubs; as admired by women, de- 
spite that his admiration of them had merged into sarcasm 
at and indifference to them; but I felt that the whole man 
in him was changed. Reserved, skeptical of all truth and of 
all worth, his generous trust changed to chill suspicion, his 
fiery impetuosity chained down under a semblance of icy 
firmness, his strong passions held down under an iron curb, 
the treachery of which he had been the victim seemed to 
have wholly altered his frank, warm, cordial nature. He was 
fond of Curly (who had just changed from the Coldstreams 
to the lieutenant-colonelcy of the — th Fusiliers, as lazy, 
sweet-tempered, fair-haired a young Adonis as ever) from 

19 


VOL. I. 


218 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


early association ; he liked me; he liked Sabretasche im- 
mensely; he liked as acquaintances several men and one 
or two women, but to rouse any more cordial feeling, to 
interest him more warmly, seemed impossible; in truth, 
the future was a blank to him, for though he would ilot 
have allowed it, and possibly did not know it, De Yigne 
was not a man to live without sympathy or affection, and 
the unconscious thirst to be loved and understood made a 
void in him which he felt, though he guessed not its cause. 

“The fact is,” said Curly to me, as we were riding down 
Piccadilly to the Park, “both the Colonel and De Yigne 
have done themselves up too soon. They go on in that 
kill joy nil admirari system till they take no pleasure in 
anything. Pm blase enough, goodness knows, and some 
things bore me infernally ; but there is plenty of fun in life 
if you only go the way to work to find it. De Yigne, poor 
fellow ! is as frozen up by this confounded miserable mes- 
alliance as the ships in the Arctic Seas. It will take some 
tremendous impetus, some wonderful force, to thaw him 
out of it again. It would do him a world of good to fall 
in love again, but he won’t, the Marble Arch would be as 
easy to ignite ; and then if it were with a girl in his own* 
rank, which it would be, as he’d be dead certain to take 
the exact contrary to the Trefusis, there would be the very 
devil to pay, wouldn’t there? Ah, by Jove, here he is I 
Beautiful creature, that mare of his is — three parts thor- 
ough-bred; and just look at her wild eye. How are you, 
De Yigne? My dear fellow, how religious you make me 
every time I come across you ! I pronounce a Benedicito 
on the Horse Guards for ordering the — th home !” 

“Yery kind of you. Curly,” laughed De Y«igne, “but 
I’m not sure I re-echo your thanksgiving. A gallop in 
the cool night through the jungle is preferable to pacin/^ 
up and down the Ride yonder.” 


GRANVILLE DE VIONE. 


219 


‘‘Wait till the Ride’s full,” replied Curly, “with all the 
gouty wits, and the dandy politicians, and the amazoiied 
belles, and the intensely got-up stockbrokers, and tlie im- 
mensely showy livery-stable hacks, who would go so de- 
lightfully if they weren’t, par hasard, broken- winded, or 
knock-kneed by way o^ change. Wait till the season, my 
good fellow — till you drink Seltzer as thirstily as a tired 
hound drinks water, till you spend the sweet hours of the 
summer nights crushed up on the stairs of Eaton Square 
or May Fair, till you waste a couple of hundred giving a 
Clarendon dinner to men and women who, having eaten 
your Strasbourg pates, drive away to demolish your char- 
acter — wait till the season, and then you’ll admit the 
superiority of enjoyment to be found in town instead of 
in campaigning. There’s nobody in town worth seeing 
yet, except, indeed, Violet Molyneux.” 

“Whom I have not seen,” said De Vigne; “but I will 
go and call there — Lowndes Square, isn’t it? — for I used 
to know her mother very well ; an eminently religious flirt, 
I remember, who made an assignation one day and prayed 
for forgiveness for it at vespers the next evening. I have 
a curiosity to see this young lady, because she has Sabre- 
tasche’s good word.” 

“A good word, by-the-by,” laughed Curly, “that’s apt 
to do them as much damage in one way as his condemna- 
tion does in another. He has begun to go about Violet, 
in his soft way, as he’s gone about after hundreds of women, 
just for all the world as one of those beautiful boa-constric- 
tors uncurls itself from a tree, and hovers over a poor little 
bird and fascinates it up to its death. She little knows 
what a desperate Lothario he is. I wonder if he’ll ever 
marry ?” 

“I wonder if you’ll ever hang yourself. Curly ?” said De 
Vigne, dryly. “Neither you nor he will do either as long 


220 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


as you are sane; but both of you may become candidates 
or Hanwell before you die, for anything I can tell.” 

“Oh! I hope not,” cried Curly, piteously. “They’ll cut 
off my hair, you know, and, like Samson, my strength (of 
conquest) lies in my locks, and my Delilahs wouldn’t look 
at me without them. I’m one of the best-looking men in 
the service, but can’t stand your statuesque style. There’s 
nothing so telling for features that can bear it, but very 
few men’s can, you know.” , 

“Good Heavens! Curly, hold your tongue,” cried He 
Yigne. “I cut my hair for comfort, not for effect, thank 
God !” 

“ Well, it has effect, if you don’t,” persisted Curly, who, 
according to his own account, gave four hours a day to his 
morning toilette. “ I say, shall we go and call on the Moly- 
neux now ? May as well, eh ? There’s no news in the 
papers, and there’s sure to be nobody decent in the Park.” 

“ Comme vous voudrez ?” said De Yigne, turning round 
his mare’s head. “I ‘think morning calls one of our 
greatest social evils, for they fritter more time away than 
they’re worth; and just when you have got into a full 
swing of a little better discourse, it is time to give place to 
somebody else and make your exit.” 

“I, au contraire, think them unspeakably pleasant,” re- 
sponded Curly. “It kills the hour, (not but that is one of 
Sabretasche’s difficulties, never of mine;) you learn all the 
news, you enjoy the luxury of hearing one best friend 
scandalize and cut up another of your dear acquaintances; 
and you can win Lady A. ’s love for life by revealing to her 
the strictly private secret Mrs. B. has just confided to you, 
under a solemn seal of silence, relative to Miss C. Bless 
you, my dear fellow, society wouldn’t half go on; there 
wouldn’t be a tithe of the on dits sown that are necessary 
to the welfare and comfort of society, if it were not for that- 
blessed institution of morning calls,” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


22 


^‘That reminds me,” said De Yigne; “yesterday, wheu 
1 was calling on the Bovilles, (they are a detestable set, but 
Ned Boville, of the Artillery, asked me to see his family 
when I came home, and tell them about him,) I was sit- 
ting in the inner drawing-room, chatting with Madame, 
when Crowndiamonds’s tilbury drove up. The two girls 
thought nobody was in the back room as they sat in the 
front — they had that moment come in from riding — and 
the elder sister whispered to the little one, who goes in for 
the kitten style and does it very badly, ‘Fanny, there’s 
Lord Crowndiaraonds; go and be doing something inter- 
esting.’ Whereupon Miss Fanny started up and knelt 
gracefully on the hearth-rug, and began tickling a spaniel 
and a pup, with enchanting naivete and sweet childish 
laughter, making such a delicious tableau that Crowndia- 
monds was quite struck, I could see, when she sprang up, 
looking caught, and her elder apologized for ‘silly little 
Fanny’s nonsense.’” 

“How intensely good !” shouted Curly. 

“Hood?” said De Vigne, bitterly. “I call it intensely 
BAD, to see girls of eighteen and twenty such artful ac- 
tresses; to know that they are bred up in such rank 
artificiality that every gesture is studied, every word 
weighed, every action that looks natural, or frank, or fresh, 
nas been prearranged beforehand, to look interesting and 
trap the unwary. They cry out that the nineteenth century 
men have lost all the strong stuff that made ‘Pro patria’ 
the rallying cry of the Greeks and Romans, that made 
Socrates choose death rather than the dishonor of flight, and 
the Gracchi stand till now synonyms of perfect manhood. 
I don’t think we have ; but if we had it would searcely be 
matter of wonder, when women like these, fed on artifice, 
cramped with conventionality, and taught politic lies from 
19 * 


222 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


their cradles, are the English wives, and mothers, and sisters 
whom it is British custom to hold up as profitable standards 
and wholesome reproofs to the rest of European ladies I” 

“The root of it is, as I read somewhere or other,” said 
Curly, “that there are no girls Dov^, they are all young 
ladies.” 

“As like one another,” said De Yigne, “as the hips and 
haws on the hedges, or the links in my Albert chain. 
Educated within the stiff chevaux-de-frise of etiquette, 
they are taught to repress every natural demonstration or 
feeling, and to follow one another in Indian file along the 
same narrow and beaten track. They are all formed alike 
in one artificial mould, all educated alike in the same clap- 
trap and superficiality. Pretty heads, with nothing in 
them ; pretty hands, that can at best snip out broderie ; 
pretty voices, that lisp out ‘Yes ’and ‘No,’ agree with the 
last speaker, if he be also the most eligible match, and dare 
enunciate no opinion of their own. They give plenty for 
the eye, not a grain for the mind; and the heart may look 
forever before it finds any food in their affections, measured 
by a foot-rule, and limited by what is ‘womanly,’ i.e., 
frozen and conventional. They are ironed down into one 
unaffected surface, which no natural impulse must ever 
venture to crumple or disturb ; and where a girl dares to 
be frank, and free, and true, her sisterhood forthwith stone 
her, and decree her ‘bold’ and ‘forward.’ The few good- 
hearted ones make constant wives and patient mothers, but 
in those few chained to the follies of their drawing-room, 
or the dull domesticities of their nursery, what man finds a 
companion ? And if he ever look for anything in them to 
think his thoughts, to sympathize in his graver studies, to 
help him on his better road; to comprehend, to refine, to 
exalt his intellect, or his aims, God help him !” 

“Ah,” said Curlv, “if ever I should meet with that dear 


GRANVTLLE DE VIGNE. 


223 


little thing you mention, who would dare to emancipate 
herself, and be demonstrative and unartificial. Pm perfectly 
certain I should fall in love with her, and therefore I do 
hope and trust I may never come across the miracle, for it 
is a horrid bore to be in love ; I infinitely prefer receiving 
unlimited worship as I do now, and giving no more than 
just warms me up agreeably.” 

“Don’t come in here, then, Curly,” said I, as we turned 
into Lowndes Square, “for, according to report, the Hon 
Vy is both demonstrative and unartificial.” 

“ That is to say, an actress a little better up in her role 
than her compeers, who, like Rachel, has the superior skill 
to make art seem nature,” said De Yigne, with a dash of 
that bitterness which lay hidden under his courteous calm 
or his witty jest; sure result of deception and treachery on 
an originally frank and unsuspecting nature. 

Lady Molyneux was at home, a rare thing for that rest- 
less mosaic of religion and fashion, of decided “ton” and 
pronounced “piety;” and at home we found her, chatting 
with one of her beloved spiritual brothers, the Bishop of 
Campanile, a most pleasant bon viveur, by no means a 
Saint Anthony on the score of earthly temptations, while 
in a low chair, exquisitely dressed, (I confess to a weakness 
for pretty toilettes for ladies, beauty unadorned, &c. is 
bosh and twaddle,) her radiant eyes sparkling, her graceful 
figure and her lovely face all instinct with life and anima- 
tion, sat Yiolet Molyneux talking to Sabretasche, who was 
listening to her with an air of half indolent amusement, 
and magnetizing her with the soft, lustrous gaze of his 
mournful eyes, that had wound their way into so many 
women’s love. 

Lady Molyneux welcomed us all charmingly. She was 
quite made of milk of roses, that dear woman; there was 
a shadow of impatience in her daughter’s tell-tale eyes at 


224 


GRANVILLE DF VIGNE. 


having her talk interrupted, but of course she was too 
much of a lady to show it, and the Colonel, who had a 
wonderful knack of monopolizing a woman quietly, did 
not give up his seat, and soon resumed his discussion with 
her, which it seems was on the poets of the present day; 
no very promising theme, you will say, as those gentlemen 
are more provocative of 13illingsgate anathemas, generally 
speaking, than of anything else. 

“ What do you think of the ‘ Ideals of the Lotus and the 
Lily?”’ asked Violet of De Vigne, referring to the book 
they were discussing, the last wild-brained and mystical 
nonsense that had issued from the imaginations of the 
pet rhymer of the day. • 

“I cannot say I think much,” smiled De Vigne. “To 
read that man’s works one wants a dictionary of all his 
nnintelligible jargon, his ‘double-barreled adjectives,’ his 
purposely obscured meanings. I suppose he fancies chi- 
ar’oscuro the best tone for paintings, that he draws his 
word-pictures in such densely dark style that our eyes 
have to grow, cat-like, used to the demi-luiniere before we 
can even guess at the meaning of the shapes that lie 
groveling in it, which, when we do drag them up into 
daylight, turn out voiceless and valueless shadows not 
worth the disemboweling.” 

“All that is treason here, De Vigne,” said Sabretasche, 
with a mischievous smile. “ Miss Molyneux is the patron 
and champion of everything visionary, high-wrought, and 
unintelligible to us ordinary mortals.” 

“Comme vous me taquinez!” cried Violet, indignantly. 
She was by this time wonderfully good friends with the 
Colonel. “I don’t think any more than you do that 
everybody who dashes down the phantasies of his seeth- 
ing brain has a right to consider himself a poet, nor that 
every lover who scribbles a few halting stanzas to his airy 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


225 


fairy Lilian has a right to consider himself as one of the 
elect of genius.” 

“Just so; boys learn the poetry of the day because it 
helps them to write their love-letters, and vaunts the mys- 
tical and misunderstood sorrows on which young fellows 
in the Werther period of life are so fond of pluming them- 
selves,” said De Vigne. “The polite ‘go to the deuce I’ 
these new rhymesters say to everybody not exactly their 
own way of thinking; the way in which they curse in 
dithyrambics all who indulge in the luxury of a little 
common sense, are what irritate me. They waste in tears 
and rhymes the hours they should give to study and rever- 
ent analysis of greater minds that have come and gone 
before them. They complain of themselves as martyrs to 
the world’s neglect, when they have not done a single thing 
to attract the world’s applause. Yet these raving indi- 
viduals, ‘sad only for wantonness,’ strangely please dreamy 
young ladies and gentlemen ignorant of the true meaning, 
sorrows, and burdens of this ‘work-a-day world.’” 

Violet made him a graceful reverence. 

“Thank you. Is that a hit at me? It does not strike 
home, if it is, because my worst enemies could never say I 
was dreamy, though they may call me — what is it, high- 
wrought ?” And she glanced at Sabretasche, who gave it 
back with as tender and a more earnest look than even he, 
faithless Lauzuu though he was, often gave women. “But 
you philosophers forget,” went on the young lady, ener- 
getically, “that feeling — romance, as you are pleased to 
call it — has been the germ and nurse of all great writers. 
The swan must suller before it sings. Did not his child 
love inspire Dante ? The eyes of Beatrice were the guid- 
ing stars of his genius. Would Petrarch have been all he 
is but for the ‘amore veementissimo ma unico ed onesto ?’ 
Did not his passion for Mary Chaworth have its in^uence 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


29.6 

for life upon the character and the writings of Byron ? 
And was not Leonora d’Este to Tasso what Diana’s kiss 
was to Endymion 

“And was not the domestic misery of Milton’s married 
life the inspiration of that glorious tirade upon women in 
Adam’s magnificent speech ?” asked Sabretasche, mischiev- 
ously; “and but for Anne Hathaway, might we have ever 
had that fiery oration of Posthumus : 

Even to vice 

They are not constant ; but are changing still 
One vice, but of a minute old, for one 
Not half so old as that?” 

“Some better woman, then, monsieur, taught him,” cried 
Fiolet, hotly, “ that from women’s eyes 

Sparkles still the right Promethean fire. 

They are the books, the arts, the academes 
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.” 

Sabretasche bowed his bead in acknowledgment of 
defeat. 

“You have conquered me, as Rosaline conquered 
Byron I” 

He said the words as he had said such things to scores 
of women as lovely as Violet Molyne*ux; from anybody 
else she would have taken them at their value ; at the 
Colonel’s glance her eyes flashed and her color deepened. 

“But don’t you think. Miss Molyneux,” suggested Do 
Vigne, quietly, “that when Tasso languished in Ferrara 
dungeons, he must have wished he had never seen the Este 
family ? Don’t you fancy that Gemma Donati must have 
rather canceled Dante’s good opinion of the beau sexe, 
and that his ‘wife, of savage temper,’ (not to mention 
Beatrice’s infidelity to him and marriage with Simon de 
Bardi, which sinks her down to the usual stamp of coquet- 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


227 


tish and bewitching young ladies, with enough of the pa- 
ternal Portinari prudence in her to take a better match 
than the orphan Alighieri,) may have been bitter tonics, 
rather than sweet balm to his genius? And as for Byron 
— well I Miss Millbanks was rather a thorn in his side, 
wasn’t she? And with all the romance in the world, I 
think, when he called on Mrs. Musters, he must have 
thought he had been rather a fool. What do you say ?” 

“I say, Major de Vigne,” responded Yiolet, solemnly, 
“that you have not a trace, not a particle, not an infini- 
tesimal germ of romance.” 

“Thank Heaven — no I” said De Vigne, with a laugh. 

I doubt, though, if the laugh was heartfelt. I dare say 
he thought of the time when romance was hot and strong 
in him, and trust and faith strong too. 

“I pity you then I Where I think you skeptical men err 
so much,” said Violet, turning her brilliant eyes on Sabre- 
tasche, “is in confounding false and true, good and bad, 
feeling with sentiment, genius with pretension. The same 
lash which you use justly on the ass in a lion’s skin, you 
use most unjustly on the real king of the forest, whose 
majesty is no usurpation, and strength no make-believe. 
Why at one sweep condemn the expression of unusual 
feeling as sentiment simply, because it is unusual ? Deep 
feeling is rare ; but it does not follow that on that account 
it is unreal. You tread on a thousand ordinary flowers — 
daisies, buttercups, cowslips, anemones — in an every-day 
walk; you snap off roses, heliotropes, magnolias, fuschias; 
they are all fair, all full of life ; but out of all the Flora, 
there is only one sensitive plant that shrinks and trembles 
at your touch. Yet, though the sensitive plant is organized 
BO far more tenderly, it is no artificial offspring of mech- 
anism, but as fresh, and real, and living a thing as any of 
the others I” 


228 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Do Yigne and Curly were chatting with Lady Molyneux, 
whose bishop had taken his conge. Sabretasche still sat 
by Yiolet, a little apart, playing with her Skye Cupidou’s 
ears. 

“I believe you,” he said, gently; there are sensitive 
plants, though they are very few, so fresh, and real, and 
fair, that it is a sin they should ever have to shiver in rude 
hands, and learn to bend with the world’s breath. But live 
as long as we have, and you will know that the deep feel- 
ing of which you are thinking is never found in unison with 
the poetic and driveling sentiment we ridicule. Boys’ 
sorrows vent themselves in words — men’s griefs are voice- 
less. If ever you feel — pray God you never may, for it 
comes only to destroy — the fierce and far-rooted passion of 
vital suffering, you will find that it may sear, wither, wear 
out life and light, but that it will never seek solace in con- 
fidence, never lament itself, but rather hug its torture 
closer, as the Spartan child hugged the fierce wolf-fangs. 
You will find the difference between the fictitious sorrows 
which run abroad proclaiming their own wrongs, and the 
grief which lies next the heart night and day; and, like 
the iron cross of the Romish priest, eats it slowly, but none 
the less surely, away.” 

They were strange words to come from gay, brilliant, 
nonchalant Yivian Sabretasche I Yiolet looked at him in 
surprise, and her laughing eyes grew sad and dimmed. He 
had forgotten for the moment where he was; at her earnest 
gaze he roused himself with the faintest tinge of color on 
his expressive face. 

“ Miss Molyneux, I am going to ask you to do me a most 
intense kindness; would you mind singing me Hullah’s 
‘Three Fishers?’ I declare to you it has haunted me ever 
since I heard you sing it on Tuesday night; and it is so 
seldom I hear any music that is not either a oawl or a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNH. 


229 


screech — rarely, indeed, anything that satisfies me as your 
songs do.” 

She sprang up joyously. “ Oh yes, I will sing it if you 
will sing me those glorious Italian songs of yours. Do 
you know I was dreadfully afraid of singing before you 
first of all. Mamma told me you were so terribly fastidious, 
and even found fault with Jenny Lind.” 

“Because I remembered Malibran. But I find no fault 
with you; your voice is very sweet, of a very full compass, 
and, with a very little more tuition, would be perfect.” 

“ I am so glad it pleases you I” cried the young belle. 
“Major De Yigne, if you have no romance, I am quite 
sure you cannot care for music, so I give you full leave to 
talk to mamma as loudly as ever you like. I am going to 
sing only to Colonel Sabretasche.” 

Colonel Sabretasche looked half pleased, half amused at 
the distinction accorded to him, and followed her to the back 
drawing-room, where he leaned on the piano, looking down 
upon her, while Violet sang — sang with one of those best 
gifts of nature and cultivation, a clear, bell-like, melodious 
voice, highly tutored, and as flexible and free as the gushing 
song of a mavis in spring-time, telling out its gladness 
under the heavy hawthorn boughs. I am not sure whether 
her mother was best pleased or not at that musical tete-a- 
tete, for Sabretasche had a universal reputation as a most 
unscrupulous flirt, and Lady Molyneux knew his char- 
acter — at least, the character given him in his circle — too 
well to think he was likely to be doing any more than play- 
ing with Violet as the most attractive beauty in town. 
But then, again, his word was almost law in all matters of 
taste. He could injure Violet irretrievably by a deprecia- 
ting criticism, and could make her of tenfold more market- 
able value by an approving word, for there were numbers 
of men at the clubs who moulded themselves by his dictum. 

20 


VOL T 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


So Lady Molyneux let them alone, having fully determined 
to marry her child either to his Grace of Regalia, a young 
fellow of four-and-twenty, or to Cavendish Grey, a minister 
and a millionnaire, before the coming season was over and 
gone. 

I don’t suppose she noticed Violet drawing out a large 
bunch of her floral namesakes from a Bohemian glass full 
of them, and lifting them up for Sabretasclie to scent. 

“Are they not delicious ? They remind me of dear old 
Corallyne, when I used to gather them out of the fresh 
damp moss. Do you know Kerry, Colonel Sabretasclie? 
No? Oh, you should go there; it is so beautiful, with its 
blue lakes, and its wild mountains, and its green, fragrant 
woodlands.” 

“I should like it, I dare say,” said Sabretasche, smiling, 
*‘with you for my guide. I want some added charm now 
to give ‘greenness to the grass and glory to the flower.’ 
Once I enjoyed them for themselves, as you do ; but as one 
gets on in life there is too silent a rebuke in nature for us 
to enjoy it unrestrainedly. Is Lord Molyneux’s estate in 
Kerry ?” 

“Don’t call it an estate,” laughed Violet; “it always 
amuses me so when I see it put down in the peerage. It 
is only miles and miles of moorland, with nothing growing 
on it but tangled wood and glorious wild-flowers. There 
are one or two cabins with inhabitants like kelpies. The 
house has been, perhaps, very grand when all we Irish were 
kings, and you Sassenachs, Roman slaves; but at the 
present moment, having lost three-quarters of its roof and 
nine-tenths of its timbers, having rats, and owls, and 
ghosts innumerable, no windows, and no furniture, you 
would probably think it more picturesque than comfort- 
able, and feel more inclined to paint it than to live ir it.” 

“But you lived in it?” 


GRANVILLE D£ VIGNE. 


231 


“Ah I when I was a child; but it was a little better 
then. There was a comfortable room or two in it, and I 
was very happy there with my favorite governess and my 
little rough pony, when papa and mamma were up here or 
in Paris, and left us to ourselves in Corallyne. I wonder 
if I shall ever be as happy as I was there 

“You are very happy here,” said Sabretasche, with a 
sort of pity for the joyous-hearted, fair, fresh Violet, to 
whom sorrow was yet but a name. 

“Happy? Oh, yes; I enjoy myself, and I am always 
light-hearted ; but I have things to annoy me here ; the 
artifices and frivolity of the society that we are constantly 
in worry me. I want to say always what I think, and 
nobody seems to do it in the world.” 

“The world would be in hot water if they did. But 
pray speak it to me.” 

“I always do — I could not do otherwise,” answered 
Violet, innocently. “Yes, I enjoy London life. I like 
the whirl, the excitement, the intellectual discussion, the 
wide-awake, vivid, real life men lead here. I should enjoy 
it entirely if I did not see too many hard, cruel, worn faces 
under the fair smiling masks.” 

“Pauvre enfant I” murmured Sabretasche. “Do you 
suppose there are any light hearts under the dominoes at 
a bal masque ?” 

Violet looked at him earnestly: 

“ Yours is not a light one ?” 

“ Mine !” echoed the Colonel, with a strangely melan- 
choly intonation ; then he laughed his gay soft laugh. “ If 
it is not, mademoiselle, you are the first who had penetra- 
tion enough to find it out. I am queteur of amusement in 
general to all my friends. There is De Vigne going, and 
BO must I. I shall not thank you for your songs.” 

“No, don’t,” said Violet, warmly. “I am so tired of 


232 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


meaningless thanks and vapid compliments. You would 
not have asked me to sing if you had not wished to hear 
me, for I know that on principle you never bore yoirself.” 

“Never,” replied Sabretasche, in his usual indolent tone. 
*‘No one is worth such a self-sacrifice.” 

“Not even I?” asked Violet, saucily raising her eye- 
brows. 

“ To suppose such a case, I must first imagine you bor- 
ing me, which just at present is an hypothesis not to be 
imagined by any stretch of poetic fancy,” laughed Sabre- 
tasche, as he held out his hand to bid her good morning. 

She held the violets up to him : 

“You have forgotten the flowers?” 

“May I have them?” asked Sabretasche, softly, with 
one of those long tender glances, in which his lengthened 
experience in that mysterious book, a woman’s heart, had 
perfected him. 

She gave them to him with a bright flush and smile. 
He slipped them hastily into the breast of his waistcoat, 
and came forward to Lady Molyneux. 

“Violet, my love,” began her mother, as the door closed 
on us, “Colonel Sabretasche comes here a great deal; I 
wish you would not be quite so — quite so — expansive with 
him.” 

“Expansive 1” repeated Violet, in sheer astonishment 
“What do you mean?” 

“I mean what I say, my dear Violet,” repeated the Vis- 
countess, the milk of roses turning a little sour. “You 
treat him quite as familiarly as if he were your brother or 
your lover. You need not color, I don’t say he is the last; 
God forbid he should be, with his principles and his well- 
known character I You really run after him. I know he 
makes himself agreeable to you, but so, as every one will 
tell you, he has done for the last twenty years to any pretty 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


23^1 

woman that came across his path ; and your speech to his 
friend De Vigne, about ‘singing only to Colonel Sabre- 
tasche,’ was not alone unmaidenly, it was absurd.” 

“How so?” said Miss Yy, the color hot in her cheeks. 
“I did not sing to the others, I only cared for him to hear 
it and like it.” 

“It was all very well for him to hear it and like it,” 
replied my lady, irritably — prominent piety has a queer 
knack of souring the temper — “his extreme fastidiousness 
makes his good word well worth having ; the best way to 
make your opinion of value in society is to admire nothing, 
as he does. But, at the same time, it is a dear way of 
gaining his applause to keep all other men in the back- 
ground while you are flirting with him. Before you saw 
him you liked Regalia, and Killury, and plenty of others, 
well enough ; now you really attend to no one else if Colo- 
nel Sabretasche chance to be in the room.” 

“Because I see their inferiority to him,” interrupted 
Yiolet, vehemently. “Their talk is cancans, compliments, 
and sentiment ; his is talent, intellect, and sense. All they 
can do is to ride, and waltz, and smoke ; he has the genius 
of an artist, whether in painting, sculpture, or music. 
They think they please me by vapid flattery; he knows 
better. They are one’s subjects, he is one’s master !” 

Lady Molyneux was seriously appalled by such an out- 
burst. She raised her eyebrows sarcastically : 

“You admire Vivian Sabretasche very much, Violet?” 

“Yes,” said Violet, fervently; “with all my soul.” 

“I should not advise you to say so, my dear.” 

“Why not? it is the truth.” 

“Few truths can be spoken,” replied the eminently re- 
•igious, fashionable lady, coldly. “Why you had bettei 
not proclaim your very Quixotic admiration for Sabre- 
tasche is, because he bears as bad a character for morality 

20 * 


'234 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


as lie bears a good one for talent and fashion. What his 
life has been every one knows pretty well : he is a most 
unprincipled libertine, and if you proclaim the interest you 
feel in him just because he has chatted with you, and sent 
you flowers, and praised your singing, you will be classed 
with the scores of pretty young girls whom he has made 
love to and left. No one ever dreams of expecting any- 
thing serious of him ; lie is the last man in the universe to 
marry, but a flirtation with him may very greatly injure 
your prospects ” 

“Oh! mamma, pray don’t!” said Violet, with a dash of 
contemptuous hauteur. “I am so sick of those words; 
they are so lowering, so pitiful, so conventional, making a 
market of one’s self and one’s best affections. I cannot bear 
to hear you speak so. I admire Colonel Sabretasche; I 
could not cease to admire him for anything other people 
might say ; and it is sacrilege to me to have a friend, yet 
listen to the world’s opinion of him, or discard him for 
anything society might whisper against him ; if untrue, it 
is beneath both his and your attention ; if true, he needs 
all the more your defense and your fidelity. As to his 
being — to his meaning — anything ‘serious,’” said Violet, 
with the color very hot in her bright, upraised face, “there 
is no question of that; he is very kind to me, his notice is 
honor to any one; but I would rather die than learn to 
look upon him as a speculation, or class him with all those 
foolish men who circle round me and try to buy me with 
their settlements. As to his life, he has led the same life 
as most men, probably ; a little more openly, perhaps, than 
those more prudent may do ; but you need only look in his 
eyes to see whether anything base or cruel can attach itself 
to him,” 

Her mother sighed and sneered, and smiled unpleas 
antly. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


236 


“ My love, the way you talk is too absurd, and a great 
deal too forward for me to condescend to argue with you. 
You forget yourself strangely; if you are not more quiet 
and circumspect you will be denounced — and very justly, 
too — as the worst ton. How is it possible for a girl of 
nineteen to judge of the character of a man of forty, a 
blase man of the world, who was one of the greatest 
roues about town while she was a little child in the 
nursery? It is too ridiculous ! But it is getting late; go 
and dress for dinner. The dear bishop, and Cavendish 
Grey, and Killury will dine here.” 

“ What a treat that girl is after the manierees manoeuvrers 
and yea-nay simpletons with which society is crowded,’* 
thought the Colonel, as he drove his tilbury from Lowndes 
Square. “Poor little sensitive plant, it would be a pity 
my hands should touch it and wither its freshness and 
fairness. Vivian Sabretasche, I say, are you growing a 
fool ? Don’t you know that the golden gates won’t open 
for you? You barred them yourself; you have no right 
to complain. Have you not been going to the bad all the 
days of your life ? Have you not persuaded the world, 
ever since you have lived in it, that you are a reckless, 
devil-may-care Don Juan, a smasher of the entire Deca- 
logue ? Why should you now, just because you have 
looked into that girl’s two clear bright eyes, be trying to 
trick yourself and her into the idea that you possess such 
rare affairs as heart, and feeling, and regrets, because she, 
fresh to life, is innocent enough to have a taste for such 
nonsense? All folly — all folly! Back to your animate 
friends, horses and men, and your inanimate loves, chisel 
and palate, or you may grow a fool in your older years, 
as many wiser men have done before. You’ve pulled up 
many fair flowers in your day, you can surely leave that 
poor Violet in peace. Your love never did anything but 
harm to any woman yet.” 


336 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


PART THE NIHTH. 

I. 

irOW A PORTFOLIO WAS UPSET IN ST. JAMES’S STREEP. 

“Oh, mamma, she is such a sweetly pretty girl, and 
Ashton is so abominably stupid, he must have knocked 
them down on purpose. Open the door. Colonel Sabre 
tasche, and let me out. It is no use telling me not — I 
will !” 

With which enunciation of her own self-will the Hon. 
Yiolet Molyneux sprang to the ground in the middle of 
St. James’s Street, just opposite the bay-window, to the 
unspeakable horror of her mother, and the excessive amuse- 
ment of De Yigne and Sabretasche, who were driving in 
the Molyneux barouche. One of the powdered, white- 
wanded, six-feet-high plushes that swayed to and fro at 
the back of the carriage, having dismounted at some order 
of his mistress’s, had happened to push, as those noble and 
stately creatures are given to pushing every plebeian peri- 
patetic, against a young girl passing on the pavement. 
The girl had with her a portfolio of pictures, which the 
abrupt rencontre with Mr. Ashton sent out of her grasp, 
scattering its contents to the four winds of heaven, and to 
jump down to apologize was the work of a second with 
that perfectly courteous, but, according to her mamma and 
her female friends, much too impulsive and unconventional 
young beauty the Hon. Yiolet, whose fatal lessons, learnt 
on the wild moorlands and among the fragrant woods ol 
her beloved Corallyne, the aristocratic experiences of her 
single season had been sadly unable to unteach her. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


237 


Ashton, how can you be so careless? Pick those 
drawings up ijamediately and very carefully,” said the 
young beauty, looking immeasurably severe and dignified. 
Then turning to the young girl, she apologized with her 
polished courtesy and her beaming smile for the accident 
her servant had caused, while Ashton, in disgusting vio- 
lence to his own feelings, was compelled to bend his stately 
form, and even to so far fall from his pedestal of powdered 
propriety and flunkeyism grandeur as to run — yes, abso 
lately run — after one of the sketches, which, wafted by a 
little breeze that must have been that mischievous imp 
Puck himself, ambled gently and tantalizingly down the 
street, leading poor Ashton chasing after it. The young 
girl thanked her with as bright a smile as Violet’s, and 
votes were divided among the men in the club windows as 
to which of the two was the most charming, though the 
one was a fashionable belle with every adjunct of taste and 
dress, and the other an unprotected little thing walking 
with a woman-servant in St. James’s Street; an artist, 
probably, only she was too young, or a governess — no! 
she was too distingude. She took her portfolio — by this 
time we in the clubs were all looking on, heartily amused, 
and Sabretasche and De Vigne were picking up the pic- 
tures with much more diligence than the grandiose Ashton 
— thanked Violet with a low graceful bow, and was pass- 
ing on, when she looked up at De Vigne. ITer lips parted, 
her eyes darkened, her face brightened with ecstatic delight. 
She stood still a minute, then she came back : “ Sir Folko I” 
But De Vigne neither saw nor heard her, his foot was on 
the step of the barouche. Ashton shut the door with a 
clang, swung himself up on the footboard, and the carriage 
rolled away into Pall Mall. 

“Violet, Violet! how you forget yourself, my love,” 
whispe>'ed Lady Molyneux, scandalized and horror-stricken. 


238 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“I wish you would not be quite so impulsive. All the 
genllemen in White’s are staring at you.” 

“ Let them stare, mamma, dear,” laughed Yiolet, merrily. 
“ It is a very innocent amusement, it gives them a great 
deal of pleasure and doe^ me no harm. What glorious 
blue eyes that girl had, and such hair — real true gold, there 
is no color like it. You should laud me for my magna- 
nimity in praising another girl so pretty.” 

“For magnanimity in that line is not a virtue of your 
sex,” said De Vigne. 

“You cynical man I I don’t see why it should not be.” 

“Don’t you? Did you, on your honor, then, fair lady, 
ever speak well of a rival ?” 

“ I ne'ver had one.” 

“You never could,” whispered Sabretasche, bending 
forward to tuck the tiger-skin over her. 

“ But supposing you had ?” persisted De Yigne. 

“I hope I should be above maligning her; but I am 
afraid to think how I should hate her.” 

She spoke with such unnecessary vehemence, that her 
mother and De Yigne stared. Yiolet’s eyes met the Colo- 
nel’s ; her color rose, and he, incongruously enough, turned 
his head away and sighed. 

“If Miss Molyneux treats the visionary things of life so 
earnestly, what will she do when she comes to the realities ?” 
laughed De Yigne. 

Lady Molyneux sighed; on occasions she would play at 
tender maternity, but it did not sit well upon her. 

“Ah I Major De Yigne, if we did not find some armor 
besides our own strength in our life pilgrimage, few of us 
women would be able to endure to the end of the Yia 
Dolorosa.” 

“ True,” said De Yigne, with that sarcasm now grafted 
in him almost as his second nature. “Britomart soon fiuda 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


239 


a buckler studded with the diamonds of a good dower, or 
stiffened with the parchment-skins of handsome settle- 
ments ; and, tender and gentle as she looks, manages to 
go through the skirmish very unscathed by dim of the 
vizor she keeps down so wisely, and the sharp lance of the 
tongue she keeps always in rest against friend and foe.” 

“ What thrusts of the spear you deserve. Major De 
Vigne; you are worse than your friend, and he is bad 
enough!” cried Violet, looking rather lovingly, however, 
on the Colonel, despite his errors. “I am sure if we 
women do take to lance and vizor, it is only in self-defense, 
for you would pierce us with your flint-headed arrows of 
sarcasm if you could find a hole in our armor.” 

“ But here and there is a woman who unhorses us at once, 
and on whom it is a shame to draw our swords. Agnes 
Hotots are very rare, but when we do find them, Rings- 
dale is safe to go down before them,” said Sabretasche, 
with his half-mournful, half-amused, wholly eloquent glance. 

“I should think you have both of you been conquered 
or imprisoned some time or other by some Cynisca or 
Maria de Jesu, whom you cannot forgive, that makes you 
so bitter upon us all !” laughed Violet. 

She said it in the gay innocence of her heart! De 
Vigne had been in India so long, she had not as yet heard 
his history. Both he and Sabretasche were silent. Violet 
instinctively felt that she had trodden on dangerous ground ; 
but they had all of them the easy tact and calm impos- 
sibility of der^glement natural in all good society — and 
De Vigne laughed, though a curse would have been better 
in unison with his thoughts. 

“ Miss Molyneux, with all due deference to your sex, there 
are few men of our age, I fear, who, if they told you the 
truth, would not have to confess having found more Blanche 
Armorys and Becky Sharpes than Artemisias or Antonia 


240 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Flaxillas. Those warm and charming feelings with which 
you young ladies start fresh in life have a knack of disap- 
pearing in the atmosphere of society, as gold disappears 
melted and swallowed up in aqua regia.” 

“Will you let your pure gold be lost in De Yigne’s 
metaphorical aqua regia?” whispered the Colonel, half 
smiling, half sadly, as he handed her out. 

“ Never 1” 

“You mean it now, but Well, we shall seel” And 

Sabretasche led her up the steps with his low, careless 
laugh. “ When you are Madame la Princesse d’Hautecour, 
or her Grace of Honiton, perhaps you will not smile so 
kindly on your old friends I” 

She turned pale ; her large eyes filled with unshed tears. 
She thought of the violets she had given him a few days 
before. 

“You are unkind and unjust. Colonel Sabretasche,” she 
said, haughtily. “What use was it pretending to wish me 
to tell you all I think and mean, if you disbelieve me when 
I do so ? I thought you more kind, more true ” 

“I am neither,” said Sabretasche, abruptly for that ultra 
suave and tender squire of dames. “Ask your mamma 
for my character, and believe what she will tell you. I 
would rather you erred in thinking too ill — though that 
people would say is impossible — than too well of me.” 

“I could never think ill of you ” began Yiolet, 

vehemently. 

“You would be wrong, then,” said Sabretasche, so 
gravely, that Yiolet, who had only seen him a gay non- 
chalant man of art and fashion, was for the moment awed. 

Just then her mother and De Yigne entered, and the 
Colonel, with his light laugh, turned round to them with 
some gay jest. Yiolet could not rally quite so quickly. 

That night, at a loo party at Sabretasche’s house, Pe 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


241 


Vigne and I told the other fellows of Violet’s impulsive 
action in St. James’s Street; at which they all laughed 
heartily, of course, except the Colonel, who went on with 
his game in impassive silence. 

“She’s a great deal too impulsive; it’s horrid bad ton,” 
yawned little Lord Killtime, an utterly blase gentleman of 
nineteen. 

“I like it,” said Curly. “It’s a wonderful treat now-a- 
days to see a girl natural and pretty en meme temps.” 

“ She is very lovely, there is no doubt about that,” said 
De Vigne. “I dare say they mean to set her up high in 
the market. Her mother is trying hard for Regalia.” 

“He’s a lost man, then,” said Wyndham, who had cut 
the Lower House and Red Tape for the lighter loves of 
Pam and Miss. “I never knew the Molyneux, senior, 
make hard running after any fellow but what she finished 
him, (she’s retreated into the bosom of the Church now, and 
puts up with portly bishops and handsome popular preachers. 
Women often do when they get passees; the Church is not 
BO difficile as the laity, I presume,) but ten or less years 
ago I vow it was dangerous to come within the signal of 
her fan, she’d such a clever way of setting at you, and 
obliging you to make love to her.” 

“Jockey Jack didn’t care,” laughed St. Lys, of the 
Eleventh. “Well! her daughter’s no manoeuvrer; she’s a 
nice, natural, animated creature ; by George, it’s worth a 
guinea a turn to waltz with her.” 

“Natural!” sneered Vane Castleton, the youngest son of 
his Grace of Tiara, the worst of all those by no means in- 
corruptible and very far from stainless pillars of the state, 
the “Castleton family.” “.Forward, you mean! By 
Heaven ! I never came across so bold, off-hand, spirited a 
young filly.” 

Sabretasche looked up, anger in his languid, tired eyes. 

21 q 


VOL I 


242 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


‘‘Permit me to differ from you, Castleton. Your re^ 
mark, I must say, is as much signalized by knowledge' of 
character and penetration as it is by delicacy and elegance 
of phraseology I Young fellows like Killtime may make 
such mistakes of judgment; we who know the world should 
be wiser. 

De Vigne, sitting next him, looked up and raised his 
eyebrows at the Colonel’s unusual interference and warmth. 

“Et tu. Brute?” 

Sabretasche understood, and gave him an admonitory 
kick under the table, with the faintest of flushes on his 
forehead. 

“ Whose portrait is that, Sabretasche ?” asked De Yigne, 
to stop Yane Castleton’s tongue, pointing to a portrait 
over the mantel-piece in the inner drawing-room, where we 
were playing; the portrait of a very pretty woman, with 
exquisite golden hair, and a brilliant, beaming, happy face. 

“My mother, when she was twenty. Didn’t you know 
it? It was taken just before she married. I believe it 
was an exact likeness. I don’t remember her. She was 
thrown from her horse, riding on the Corso, when I was a 
little fellow.” 

“ It reminds me of somebody — I cannot think of whom,” 
said De Yigne. “I beg your pardon, I take ‘miss.’” 

“ Why will you talk through the game ?” said I. “ Don’t 
you think the picture is like that girl who occasioned 
Yiolet’s championship this morning? That’s whom you 
are thinking of, I dare say.” 

“Who’s talking now, I wonder I” said De Yigne. 
“Hearts trumps? I did not notice that girl; I was too 
amused to see Miss Molyneux. No, it is somebody else, 
but who, I cannot think, for the life of me ’ 

“Nor can I help you,” said Sabretasche, “for there ia 
not a creature related to my mother living. But now 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


243 


Arthur mentions it, that little girl was not unlike her; at 
least, I fancy she had the same colored hair; that often 
makes a fancied resemblance. Apropos of likenesses, 
there will be a very pretty picture of Lady Geraldine 
Ormsby in the Exhibition this year. I saw it, half finished, 
at Maclise’s yesterday.” 

“ Why don’t you exhibit, Sabretasche ?” said Wyndham. 
“You paint a deuced deal better than half those Fellows 
and Associates I” 

“Bien oblige I” cried the Colonel. “I should be par 
ticularly sorry to hang up my pets off my easel to be put 
level with people’s boots, or high above their possible vis- 
ion, or — if honored with the ‘second row’ — be flanked 
by shocking red-haired pre-Raphaelite angels and staring 
portraits of gentlemen in militia uniform, and criticised by 
a crowd of would-be cognoscente and dilettante cockneys, 
with a catalogue in their hand and Ruskin rules in their 
mind, who go into ecstasies over Millias’s great, glaring, 
wide-mouthed monstrosities, and cottage scenes with all 
Teniers’s vulgarities and none of Teniers’s redeeming talent. 
Exhibit my pictures? The fates forefend ! Wyndham, 
help yourself to that Chablis, and, De Vigne, there is 
some of our pet Madeira. How sorry I am Madeira now 
grows graves instead of grapes ! Nonsense 1 Don’t any 
of you think of going yet. Let us sit down again for a 
few more rounds.” 

We did, and we played till the raw February dawn was 
growing gray in the streets,* the guineas, jingling merrily 
in the pool, changing their owners quick as lightning, 
while we laughed and talked over Sabretasche’s splendid 
wines and liqueurs — laughs that might have jarred on 
Violet’s refined ears, and talk that might have made her 
young heart heavy, coming from her hero’s lips. But when 
we were gone, and the wine carafes were emptied and th«» 


244 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


fire burning low, the master of that exquisite Park Lane 
temple to Epicuris and Aristippus sat before the dying 
embers with his dog’s head upon his knee, and thought : 

“What a fool I am ! With every one of the agremens 
of life, I am tired of it. Women, wine, cards, art, music, 
high play — are they all losing their enchantment for me? 
Are my rose-leaves beginning to lose their scent, and 
crumble under me? That girl — child she is to me — has 
been the only one who has had penetration enough to see 
that the bal masque has ceased its charm for me. She 
reads me truer than all of them. She will believe no ill 
of me. She almost makes me wish there were no ill for 
her to believe! Poor Yiolet I she fancies me ‘kind’ and 
‘true.’ Shall she be the first woman to whom I have 
shown mercy, the first for whom I have renounced self^ 
I have trodden down flowers enough in my path, I may 
surely afford to spare this single ‘sensitive plant.’ Cid, 
old boy! is your master wholly dead to generosity and 
honor because the world happens to say he is ? No more, 
perhaps, than he is gay, and careless, and light-hearted, 
because it is the fashion to consider him so 1” 

That night Yiolet Molyneux stood before her glass, in 
her gossamer ball dress, just home from a ball given by the 
Life Guards, though it was not the season, after some 
amateur theatricals. The brilliant Irish beauty had been 
the belle of the room ; she had had fifty bouquets sent her 
for it, half the men there had gone and lost their heads 
after her straightway, she had had more partners to solicit 
her than she could have written on a dozen tablets, she 
had waltzed delightedly and untiringly as a Willis, and 
Yiolet loved waltzing and enjoyed admiration — as all 
women do who are the stuff to win it, only so few confess 
to the very natural fact — but still, just now, she stood 
before her glass, and sighed, as her maid detached her 
bouquet de corsage. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


246 


“Mademoiselle,” said her maid, as if she divined her 
young mistress’s thoughts, “pendant la soiree cette boite 
est venue pour vous de la part de Monsieur le Colonel 
Sabretasche. Youlez-vous que je la fasse ouvrir?” 

“Non, non, Jeanne, laissez-la; je I’ouvrirai moi-meme,” 
said Yiolet, hastily. 

As soon as Yiolet’s disrobing was over, and her maid 
dismissed for the night, down on her knees she went 
before Sabretasche’s box. She knew what it was; it was 
a statuette, modeled from her pet greyhound and its 
puppy, that the Colonel had done for her with that chisel 
which Yiolet, at the least, thought Praxiteles’ could never 
have equaled. It was really a pretty thing in its crimson 
velvet and ebony box ; there was not a word with it, but 
Yiolet kissed it, laughed, and could almost have cried over 
it. “He did remember me, then,” she thought, “though 
he did not come to the ball.” 

Yiolet was very rapid, you see, with her conclusions, 
and quite as rapid with her forgiveness. 

That night De Yigne and I smoked our pipes together 
over his fire in Grosvenor Place, where, as his troop was 
quartered in town, he had for the season taken a furnished 
house. Yigne had' been shut up since his mother’s death, 
and he rarely alluded even distantly to his ancestral home, 
that had been the scene of his folly and his wrongs. I do 
not think he could have endured to see it, much less to live 
in it. 

“Is Sabretasche really getting epris with that bewitch- 
ing Irish girl ?” said I to him, as we sat smoking. 

“God knows !” said De Yigne. “He was rather touchy 
about her, wasn’t he ? But that might only be for the 
pleasure of setting down Castleton, a temptation I don’t 
think I could forego myself. According to his own show- 
ing he’s never in love with any woman, but, most indis- 
21 * 


24B 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


putab];. he makes love to almost all he comes across that 
are worth the exertion. 

‘‘ Oh yes, he’s a deuced fellow where the beaux yeux are 
concerned; but he might be really caught once, you know, 
though he’s gone scathless all these years.” 

“Certainly,” assented De Yigne; “none are so wise that 
they may not become fools. Socrates, when he was old, 
sage as he was, did not read in the same book with a 
woman without falling in love with her.” 

“You are complimentary to love 1 Is it invariably a 
folly?” 

“ I think so. At least, all I wish for is to keep clear of 
it all the rest of my life. Passion has cost me a vast deal 
too much for me ever willingly to yield to it again, even 
supposing I felt it, which I never shall.” 

“Why?” said I, looking at him, and thinking that if 
he renounced love, women would not renounce it for him. 

“Need you ask? From my boyhood I was the fool of 
my passions. To love a woman was to win her. I stopped 
for no consideration, no duty, no obstacle; I let nothing 
come between me and my will. I was as obstinate to 
those who tried ever to stop me in any pursuit as I was 
weak and mad in yielding up my birthright at any price if 
I could but buy the mess of porridge on which I had for 
the time being set my fancy. Scores of times I did that 
. — scores of times some worthless idol became the thing on 
which I staked my soul. Once I did it too often. You 
know how, as well as I. You need not wonder, I think, 
that I look on love as my worst foe, and a foe under whose 
iron heel I will never let myself be prostrate again. 
Arthur, you know my past, therefore I can say to you 
what I would to no other man. You know the curse of 
my life, but you do not know how it has cursed me. From 
the hour I left the church on my marriage-day youth wag 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


m 

crushed out of my heart and life. It is such eternal miserv 
that that woman, so low-born, so low-bred, shameless, de- 
graded, all that I know her to be, should bear my name, 
should proclaim abroad all the folly into which my reckless 
passions led me. Thank God I knew it when I did — thank 
God I left her as I did — thank God that no devils like 
herself were born to perpetuate my shame, and make me 
loathe my name because they bore it. Then you ask me 
if I am steeled to love I Love was the mocking Circe, 
the beautiful fiend, the painted syren, that lured me to my 
betrayal. It has changed my whole nature — the misery of 
that loathsome connection; it has altered what was soft in 
me into marble, what was warm into ice. It is not the tie 
I care for — of the importance of marriage I think little, of 
affection still less — it is the odium of knowing that she 
bears my name, the humiliation of remembering that twice 
in my life have I been fooled by her coarse, mindless, 
sensuous beauty, her depraved mind, her cruel heart; it is 
the remorse of pride sacrificed to mad self-will; the agony 
of feeling that my mother, the only pure, the only true, the 
only generous love fate ever gave me, died, murdered by 
my reckless passions.” 

His hands clinched on the arms of his chair; a gray, 
ashy hue set over his face ; it looked cast in dark, cold 
stone. It was my first glimpse of that spirit which, exor- 
cised or invisible, in society and ordinary life, fastened re- 
lentless upon him in his hours of solitude. Passion was 
very far from dead in that hot, vehement, and deep-seated 
nature, Nhough now it was hurled from its throne, and 
chained down hard, and fixed in fetters of iron by a reso- 
lute h^Mid. 

Tb'^t night, too, at that same hour, in a little bed whose 
curtains and linen were white and pure as lilies, a young 
girl slept, like a rosebud lying on new-fallen snow; her 


248 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


golden hair fell over her shoulders, her blue eyes were 
closed under their black silky lashes, a bright, happy 
smile was on her lips, and as she turned in her dreams 
she spoke unconsciously in her sleep two words — “Sir 
Folko b’ 


II. 


HOW A WIFE TALKED OP HER HUSBAND. 

In a very gay and gaudy drawing-room in the Champs 
Elysees, in an arm-chair, with her feet on a chauflerette, 
in a scarlet peignoir trimmed with lace, looking a very im- 
posing and richly-colored picture, sat the Trefusis, (such I 
have always called her and always shall,) none the less 
handsome for six years’ wear in Paris life, intermixed with 
visits to the Bads, where she was almost as great an at- 
traction as the green tables, and the sound of her name as 
great a charm as the irresistible “ Faites votre jeu, mes- 
sieurs — faites votre jeu I” a little fuller about the cheek and 
chin, a trifle more Junoesque in form, a little higher tinted 
in the carnation hue of her roses, otherwise none the worse 
for the eight years that had passed since she wore the 
orange-blossoms and the diamond ceinture, on her mar- 
riage morning in Yigne church. 

She had an English paper in her hand, and was running 
her eye over the fashionable intelligence. Opposite to her 
was old h'antyre, her nose a little more hooked, her eye 
sharper, her rouge higher, a little more dirty, quick, witty, 
and detestable, than of yore; taking what she called a 
demi-tasse, but which looked uncommonly like cognac un- 
contarainated by Mocha. They led a very pleasant life in 
Paris, I dare say ; with the old lady’s quick wits, question 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


249 


able introductions, and imperturbable impudence, and the 
Trefusis’s beauty, riches, and excessive freedom, they were 
pretty certain to find plenty of people to drink their cham* 
pagne, play ecarte, go to the Pre Catalan, and make gay 
parties to the Bois de Boulogne with them ; and if they 
did not know the De Broglie, the Bochefoucauld, the 
Bochejacquelein, the Tintiniac, and all the great Legiti- 
mist nobles, there were plenty of others as gay and as 
amusing, if not as exclusive, as the grandees of the Fau- 
bourg and the Place Vendome. 

“What’s the matter, my dear?” asked Lady Fantyre; 
“you don’t look best pleased.” 

“I am not pleased,” said the Trefusis, her brow dark, 
and her full under-lip protruded. “ De Yigne is come 
back.” 

“Dear, dear! how tiresome 1” cried the Fantyre; “just 
when you’d begun to hope he’d been killed in India. Well, 
that is annoying. It’s a nice property to be kept out of, 
ain’t it? But you see, my dear, strong men of his age are 
not good ones to be heir to, even with all the chances of 
war. So he’s come back, is he ? What for, I wonder ?” 

“Here it is, among the arrivals: ‘Meurice’s Hotel: 
Major De Yigne.’ He is come back because he is tired of 
Scinde, probably. I wonder if he will come to Paris? I 
should like to meet him.” And the Trefusis laughed, 
showing her white regular teeth. 

“Why, my dear? To give him a dose of that absinthe, 
that your friend De Croquenoire killed himself with last 
week, because you won fifty thousand francs from him at 
ecarte in ten nights, and then laughed at him to Anatole 
de Felice ? No, you’re too prudent to do anything of that 
sort. Whatever other commandments you break, my dear, 
it won’t be the sixth, because there’s a capital punishment 
for it,” said the old lady, chuckling at the simple idea. 


200 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“You’d like to meet him, you say — I shouldn’t. I don’t 
forget his face in the vestry. Lord I how he did look ! his 
face as white as a corpse, and as fierce as the devil’s.” 

“Did you ever see the devil?” sneered the Trefusis. 

“Yes, my dear — in a scarlet peignoir; and very well he 
looks in women’s clothes, too,” said the Fantyre, with a 
diabolical grin. 

The Trefusis laughed too: 

‘'He has found me a devil, at any rate.” 

“Well, yes; everybody has, I think, that has the pleas- 
ure of your acquaintance,” chuckled Lady Fantyre. “But 
I don’t think so much of your revenge, myself. What’s 
three thousand a year out of his property? And as for 
not letting him marry, I think that’s oftener kindness than 
cruelty to a man. Don’t you think it would have been 
better to have queened it at Vigne (what a splendid place 
that was, to be sure ! and such wines as he had !) and had 
an establishment in Eaton Square, and spent his forty 
thousand a year for him, and made yourself a London 
leader of fashion, and ridden over the necks of those 
haughty Ferrers people, (by the way, those girls didn’t 
marry so very well after all,) and all his stiff-necked friends 
— that beautiful creature, Vivian Sabretasche, among ’em ? 
What do you think, eh ?” 

“It might have been better for me, but it would have 
spoilt my revenge. He would have left me sooner or later, 
and as he is infinitely too proud and reserved a man to 
have told the world the secret of his disgrace in finding 
Constance Trefusis to be Lucy Davis, I should have lost 
the one grand sting in my vengeance — his humiliation 
before the world.” 

“Pooh, pooh I my dear, a man of fortune is never hu- 
miliated; the world’s too fond of him. The sins of the 
fathers are only visited on the children where the children 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


251 


fire going down in the world.” (The Fantyre mignt he a 
nasty old woman, but she spoke greater truths than most 
good people.) “So,” continued the old lady, “you sacri- 
ficed your aggrandizement to your revenge? Not over 
sensible.” 

“You can’t accuse me of often yielding to any weak- 
ness,” said the Trefusis, with a look in her eye like a vicious 
mare. “However, my revenge is not finished yet.” 

“Eh? Not? What’s the next act? On my word, 
you’re a clever woman, Constance. You do my heart 
good.” 

The first time, by the way, that Lady Fantyre ever 
acknowledged to a heart, or the Trefusis received such a 
compliment. 

“This. Remember, I know his nature — you do not 
Some day or other De Yigne will love passionately — • 
probably somebody in his own rank, and as utterly unlike 
me as possible. Then he will want to be free ; then, in- 
deed, he shall realize the curse of the fetters of church and 
law by which I hold him.” 

The old lady chuckled immensely over the amusing 
prospect : 

“Very likely, my dear. It’s just what they can’t do 
that they always want to do. Tell a man wine’s good for 
him, and forbid him water, he’d forswear his cellar, and 
run to the pump immediately. And if you heard that he’d 
fallen in love, what would you do ?” 

“Go to England, and put myself between her and him, 
as his deserted, injured, much enduring, and loving wife.” 

Old Fantyre drank up her coffee, and nodded ap- 
provingly. 

“That’s right, my dear! Play your game. Play it 
out; only take care to keep the honors in your own hand, 
and never trump your partner’s card.” 


S52 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Not much fear of my doing that,” said the Trefusis, 
with a grim smile. 

There was not, indeed ; she marked her cards too 
cleverly. Yet cards marked with all the dexterity imagin- 
able have been found out on occasion, and the consequences 
have been a very uncomfortable esclandre to the sharper 
who devised them. 


III. 

HOW WE FOUND THE LITTLE QUEEN OP THE FAIRIES IN 
RICHMOND PARK. 

Not content with his house in Park Lane, Sabretasche 
had lately bought, besides it, a place at Richmond that 
had belonged to a rich old Indian millionnaire. It was 
an exquisite place, for it had been originally built and 
laid out by people of good taste, and the merchant had 
not lived long enough in it to spoil it; he had only chris- 
tened it the Dilcoosha, which title, meaning Heart’s De- 
light, and being out of the common, Sabretasche retained. 
It was very charming, with its gardens, more like an 
Arabian dream than anything I ever saw, sloping down 
to the Thames. It was a pet with the Colonel, and was 
a sort of Strawberry Hill, save that his taste was much 
more symmetrical and graceful than Horace’s; and he 
spent plenty of both time and money, touching it up and 
perfecting it till it was beautiful in its way as Luciennes. 
De Yigne and I drove down one morning to the Dilcoosha, 
toward the end of February, to see the paces tried, on a 
level bit of grass-land outside the grounds, of a beautiful 
chestnut Sabretasche had entered for the Ascot Cup, and 
rechristened,' with Violet Molyneux’s permission, “La Vio- 
ictte.” Stable slang and the delights of “ossy men” were 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


not refined enough for the Colonel’s taste, but ne liked to 
keep a good racing stud; he liked his horses to run, be- 
cause it gave him an interest and excitement in the race, 
and he wished to have De Yigne’s opinion of La Yiolette, 
for De Yigne, who loved horseflesh cordially, was one of 
the best judges of it, and one of the surest prophets of 
success or failure that ever talked over a coming Derby 
on a Sunday afternoon at Tattersall’s. 

So De Yigne and I agreed to lunch with him at Rich- 
mond, one morning, and after parade De Yigne drove 
down his mail-phaeton, picked me up in Kensington, and 
we bowled along the road to the Dilcoosha at a spanking 
pace, he handling the ribbons of a splendid pair of grays 
. — not the Cupid and Psyche he had driven tandem to the 
Strand to see old Boughton Tressillian nearly nine years 
before, but first-rate goers — who tooled us along at ten 
miles an hour, while a great bull-dog, a new purchase of 
De Yigne’s, as savage a creature as I ever beheld, and for 
that reason no favorite with his master, tore along beside 
us in the whirlwind of dust raised by the grays and the 
phaeton. 

“What trick do you think my man Harris served me 
yesterday ?” said De Yigne, as we came near Richmond. 

“Harris — that good-natured fellow? What has he 
done.” 

“Cut and run with a dozen of my shirts, three morning 
and two dress coats — in fact, a complete wardrobe, and 
twenty pounds or so — I really forget how much exactly — 
that I had left on the dressing-table when I went to mess 
last night. And that man I took out of actual starvation 
at Bombay, have forgiven him fifty odd peccadilloes, let 
him off when I found him taking a case of my sherry, be- 
cause he blubbered and said it was for his mother, found 
up the poor old woman, who wasn’t a myth, and wrote to 
VOL. I. 22 


254 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Stevens at Yigne to give her an almshouse, and then this 
fellow walks off with fifty pounds’ worth of my goods! 
And you talk to me of people’s gratitude 1 Bah I How 
can you have the face, Arthur, to ask me to admire human 
nature ?” 

“I don’t ask you to admire it — Heaven forefend! — I 
don’t like it well enough myself. What a confounded 
rascal! ’Pon my life there seems a fate in your seeing 
the dark side of humanity.” 

“ The side ? Where’s any other? I never found 
any gratitude yet, and I don’t expect any. People court 
you while you’re of use to them ; when you are not, you 
may go hang. Indeed, they will help to swing you off the 
stage, to lessen their own sense of obligation.” 

“But I swear,” I exclaimed, wrathfully, “that everybody 
seems eternally bent on doing you wrong. You do them 
kindnesses and get no thanks. I give you leave to be as 
skeptical as you choose; you have full warrant.” 

“I should say so. My old cockatoo is the only thing 
faithful to me,” said He Yigne, with a laugh, “and he’d 
go, I dare say, to anybody who offered him a larger piece 
of fruit or butter. Poor old Cocky I there’s no reason 
why he should be better than the grand, highly-cultured, 
spiritual ‘genus homo,’ who are so fond of claiming affinity 
with the angels and of looking down on him as a very in- 
ferior creation. Yes, Harris cut and run; it’s rather fun 
to me he did it so cleverly; it’s intensely amusing to spy 
out all these people’s little arts and machineries. He 
packed the things quietly in my valise when I was gone 
to mess, told the other servants the Major was going to 
the north for salmon-fishing with Colonel Sabretasche, and 
wished his things to be taken to the station ; had a cab 
hailed, and drove off, telling them he and the Major should 
be back in a fortnight at most. Wasn’t it a good idea? 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


255 


There’s one thing, I’ve a much cleverer fellow in his stead, 
so I am rather a gainer. This man’s name is Raymond : he 
knows French and German very well, is thoroughly used 
to his business, and will be much more use to me. He’s 
really quite an elegant-looking fellow. When he walks 
off with anything, it won’t be less than my diamond wrist- 
band studs or my dinner plate. Hallo ! what’s the row ? 
What is that brute Moustache doing? I know that dog 
will come to grief some day.” 

We were now driving through the park, that fresh, 
beautiful park that the barbarous Yankee decreed to want 
“clearing” — I should say, his appreciation of beauty 
wanted clearing rather more — and the dog had bounded 
on many yards in front of us, with his black muzzle to the 
ground, apparently more engaged in bringing others to 
grief than coming to grief himself, for, having met a very 
small Skye in his onward path, he had immediately given 
chase ; and having nipped scores of cats, and not a few dogs, 
by the neck in his time, and being in his general habits a 
most blood-thirsty individual, it was easy to predict which 
way the chase w'ould end. He Yigne whistled and shouted 
to him — all in vain. Moustache had only belonged to him 
a few days, and had not the slightest respect for his master. 
The little Skye fled before him ; but the Skye’s minutes 
were already numbered, when a girl, sketching under the 
trees, sprang forward, caught up the little dog, and slowly 
retreated, keeping her eyes steadily fixed on Moustache’s 
fierce, glaring, yellow eyeballs, and ferocious white fangs, 
which his lips, curled up in an ominous growl, fully dis- 
played. We had barely reached the spot, even at our 
stretching gallop — and De Yigne lashed the horses like 
mad, for he knew the bull-dog was dangerous — when 
Moustache, furious at the interruption to his sport, leaped 
np and snapped at the puppy. The girl, with more pluck 


256 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


tbari prudence, lifted her Skye out of his reach, and struck 
the bull-dog’s great bullet head with all the force of her 
little clinched right hand. Moustache gave one fierce low 
growl, sprang upon her and knocked her down, griping at 
her throat. Just as his immense teeth, covered with angry 
foam, almost touched her neck, De Yigne sprang off the 
phaeton, caught the dog’s skin, and dragged him back. 
Moustache strove like a mad thing to wrench from his 
grasp, and fly at him, for, balked of its prey twice, its 
savageness was as dangerous as madness. De Vigne set 
his teeth ; it was as much as he could do to hold the furi- 
ous beast, but he clinched at its throat harder and harder, 
never relaxing the iron hold of his right hand, till, as the 
struggles in his grasp grew fainter and more feeble, and 
Moustache was well-nigh strangled, he stretched out his 
left hand to me for the driving-wliip ; but the girl, who had 
not fainted, or screamed, or had any nonsense, sprang up, 
laid her hand on his arm, and said, in a pretty, soft, be- 
seeching voice, — 

“Please don’t hurt your dog any more — pray don’t. 
He could not tell he was doing any wrong, poor fellow, 
and he has had quite punishment enough.” 

De Vigne turned to her with a smile. He liked her for 
thinking of the dog instead of her own past danger. 

“Yes, he knew he was doing wrong, because he has 
been taught never to fly at anything without command. 
But, to be sure, he cannot help the nature he was born with 
being a savage one; and, I dare say, the only law he will 
recognize will be a muzzle. It is I who am to blame, for 
letting him go without one. You are not hurt at all, I 
trust? You are a very brave young lady not to be more 
frightened.” 

She was frightened, though ; for, now the excitement was 
over, she was very pale, and trembled a good deal besides. 


GRANVILLE DE YIONE. 


257 


Sue had to lean against one of the trees, for in her fall she 
had slightly twisted her left ankle. 

“You have hurt your foot!” exclaimed De Yigne 
“ Confound the dog, what a fool I was to bring him I la 
it very painful ?” 

“No.” 

“I fancy it is, in spite of your denial. I fear you will 
never forgive my dog or me, and if you do, I shall not 
easily pardon myself for allowing such a savage brute to 
run loose. Pray do not try to walk,” he cried, as the girl, 
with a bright smile, began to limp along the road. “Allow 
me to drive you to your home; if you exert that ankle 
while it is just hurt you may have such a tedious sprain. 
Let me drive you home. If you refuse, I shall think you 
bear some resentment still, and it would only be just if you 
did. Allow me — pray do.” 

“ Oh, thank you, it is not far ; but there are all my 
sketching things, and — indeed, I think I could walk.” 

“But I think indeed you must not. Soames, give the 
ribbons to Captain Chevasney, and go and pick up those 
drawings and color-boxes under the tree yonder. Now, 
where may I drive ?” said De Yigne, lifting the little artist 
into the front seat, with her Skye on her lap, and her port- 
folio, block, and moist-color-box under the seat. Soames 
was bidden to walk on to Colonel Sabretasche’s. I got up 
in the back seat, and De Yigne took the ribbons, gave the 
grays their lieads, and started off again. The young artist 
was a very fascinating-looking little waif and stray; but 
De Yigne would have done just the same if it had been an 
elderly gentleman, or an old market woman, whom Mous- 
tache had disabled. “ Where am I to drive ?” he asked. 

“ To St. Crucis-on-the-Hill ; a long name, but a very 
little farm,” laughed the girl. “You do not know it, I 

22 * 


258 


GRAN\T[LLE PE VIGNE. 


dare say? No; I thought not. When we are out of the 
park turr. to the left, take the first turning to the right, 
and a quarter of a mile straight on will bring you there. 
I am so sorry to take you so far.’' 

“ My grays will do ‘so far’ in ten minutes,” said De Yigne, 
smiling. It was no particular pleasure to him to drive this 
girl home, and he did not say it was ; he never compli- 
mented by mere complaisance now. “Do you often come 
to sketch in this park ?” 

“Almost every day,” said the little lady, who had not lost 
the dear privilege of her sex, the tongue, and talked to De 
Yigne as frankly as to an old acquaintance. “ I love the 
trees so dearly. I am never tired of watching the shadows 
fade off and on, and the delicate, fresh first green give place 
to golden brown, and the shy, graceful deer come trooping 
up to lie down under their great boughs. One can never 
tire of woodland scenery, there is so much change in it.” 

“ You take a different view of Richmond Park to the 
generality,” laughed De Yigne. “ With most young ladies 
Richmond is connected with water parties and dejeuners, 
flirtations and champagne.” 

She laughed. 

“ I know of none of those things, so I cannot well asso- 
ciate them with it. Richmond to me is full of other re- 
membrances: of charming Horace Walpole and lovely 
Anne Darner, of Swift and Gay, and St. John and the 
‘little crooked thing that asks questions,’ (how I detest 
Lady Mary for calling him sol) and all those courtly 
gentlemen and stately ladies with their hoops and their 
patches, their minuets and their Ombre, who used to gather 
here like so many Watteau groups.” 

“She’s talkative enough!” thought De Yigne, as he 
answered her : “ Few young ladies who come to Richmond 
uow would know much about your associations, despite 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


259 


their ‘finisning.’ Their present is too full of inanities to 
allow them time to dwell on the beauties of the past.” 

“And my present is so empty that I am driven to history 
for companions and memories,” said the girl, with a shadow 
on her face. “This is the turning — in at that gate, if you 
please.” 

We turned in at the gate — it was as much as the dashing 
mail-phaeton could do to pass it — and into a small paved 
court belonging to a little farm. On one side of it stood 
hayricks and a barn, where a stout, red-haired Omphale 
was feeding chickens, and beguiling an awkward Hercules 
in fustian from his proper task of taking out a cartful of 
bread into the town; on the other side stood the house, a 
long, low, thatched, and picturesque tenement, more like 
Hampshire than Middlesex ; at the bottom there was a 
garden, an orchard, and a paddock, now black and bare 
enough in the chill February morning. 

“You will come in ?” said the little artist, as we drew up 
before the door. “Pray do. I want to speak to you.” 

“What a strange little thing!” whispered De Yigne to 
me, as we followed her through the house to a room at the 
west end, a long low room, with an easel standing in its 
wide bay-window, and water-colors, etchings, pastels, etudes 
k deux crayons, pictures of all kinds, were hung about its 
walls, while some books, and casts, and flowers gave a 
refinement to its plain simplicity often wanting in many a 
gilt and gorgeous drawing-room I have entered. 

“So you have not recognized me I” said the girl, taking 
off her black hat, and looking up in De Vigne’s face. 

As she spoke, I remembered hef as the same with the 
subject of Violet Molyneux’s amusing episode in Pall Mall. 
De Vigne was wholly surprised ; he looked at her for some 
moments, 

“ Kecogiiize you ? I am ashamed to say I do not.” 


260 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE 


“Ahl you nave so much more to think of than I. It 
is not the least likely you could, but I have never forgotten 
you. Sir Folko. I knew you the other day, when that 
young lady’s servant knocked down my portfolio. Have 
you quite forgotten little Alma ? I am so glad to see you 
— you cannot think how much I” 

And Alma Tressillian held out both her hands to him, 
with a bright, joyous smile on her upraised face. 

“Little Alma I” repeated He Yigne. “Yes, yes! I 
remember you now. Where could my mind have gone 
not to recognize you at once? You are not the least 
altered since you were a child. But how have you come 
from Lorave to London ? Come, tell me everything. My 
dear child, you are not more pleased to see me than I am 
to see you I” 

I think that was only a bit of courteous kindness on He 
Yigne’s part; in reality, he cared very little about it, 
though Alma Tressillian was pretty enough not to have 
been viewed altogether with indifference by most men. I 
am not sure, though, that pretty is the word for her. It 
is so dealt out to every girl who resembles those lovely 
waxen dolls sold in diminutive baby-clothes or ball-dresses 
in the Pantheon, or who chances to have a pink color and 
a stereotyped smile, that I hate using it to a woman worth 
admiring. I generally take refuge in those far higher 
words — fascinating, seduisante, brilliant, attrayante — where 
I really like a woraah — but how few deserve rhose epithets I 
Alma was little altered since her childhood : now, as then, 
her golden hair and eloquent dark-blue eyes, with the con- 
stant change, and play, and animation of all her features, 
made her greatest beauty. They were not regularly beau- 
tiful as Yiolet Molyneux’s, though with her, as with Yiolet, 
the mobility and extreme intellectuality of expression was 
the chief charm, after all. She was not so tall as Yiolet, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


26 . 


nor had she that exquisite and perfect form which made 
the belle of the season compared with Pauline Bonaparte; 
but she had something graceful and fairyesque about her, 
and both her face and figure were instinct with a life, an 
intelligence, a radiance of expression which promised you 
a rare combination of sweet temper and hot passions, in- 
tense susceptibility, and higlily cnltivated intellect. You 
might not have called her pretty : you must have called her 
much more — irresistibly winning and attractive. 

“ Come, tell me everything about yourself,” repeated De 
Vigne, as he pushed a low chair for her, and threw himself 
down on an arm-chair near. “ You must remember Captain 
Chevasney as well as you do me. We shall both of us be 
anxious to hear all you have to tell.” 

“Yes, I remember him,” smiled Alma, with a pretty 
bend of her head, (she did not add “as well.”) “I was 
so sorry when you did not see me that day in Pall Mall; t 
thought I might never come across you again. You must 
not be too cross to that poor bull-dog, for if he had not 
flown at Sylvo I might not have found you now.” 

“I am under obligations to Moustache, certainly,” said 
De Yigne, with a half-smile. “Nevertheless, I shall never 
bring him here again, for his fangs were dangerously near 
your throat. He is a savage brute, but he has had a lesson 
he will not easily forget. But where is your grandpapa? 
— is he in town ?” 

She looked down, and her lips quivered : 

“Grandpapa is in Lorave. He has been dead three 
years.” 

“Dead I My dear child, how careless of me ! I am 
grieved, indeed I” exclaimed De Yigne, involuntarily. 

“You could not tell,” answered Alma, looking up at 
him, great tears in her blue eyes. “He died more than 
three years ago, but it is as fresh to me as if it were but 


262 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


yesterday. Nobody will ever love me as he did. He was 
so kind, so gentle, so good. In losing him I lost every- 
thing. I prayed day and night that I might die with him; 
he was my only friend !” 

“Poor little Alma !” said De Yigne, touched out of that 
haughty reserve now habitual to him. “I am grieved to 
hear it, both for the loss to you of your only protector, 
and the loss to the world of as true-hearted and noble- 
natured a man as ever breathed. If I had been in England 
he would have seen me in Lorave, as I promised, but I 
have been in India the eight years since we parted. I wish 
I had written to him; I ought to have done so; but one 
never knows things till too late.” 

“He left a letter for you, in case I should ever meet you. 
You were the only person kind to us after the loss of his 
fortune,” said Alma, as she sprang across the room — all 
her movements were rapid, and had something foreign in 
them — knelt down before a desk, and brought an unsealed 
envelope to De Yigne, directed to him by a hand now 
powerless forever. 

“This for me ? I wish I had seen him,” said De Yigne, 
as he put it away in the breast of his coat. “I ought to 
have written to him; but my own affairs engrossed me, 
and — we are all profound egotists, you know, whatever un- 
selfishness we may pretend. What was the cause of his 
death ? Will it pain you to tell me ?” 

“Paralysis. He had a paralytic stroke six months 
before, which ended in congestion of the brain. But how 
gentle, how good, how patient he was through it all I 
There was never any one like him.” 

She stopped again; the tears rolled off her long black 
lashes. She was quite unaccustomed to conceal what she 
felt, and she did not know that feeling is bad ton. * 

“And you have been in England ever since?” asked Do 
Yigne, to divert her thoughts. 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


263 


“Oh no!” she answered, brushing the tears off her 
lashes. “You know Miss Russell, the governess grand- 
papa took for me to Lorave ? She has been so kind. She 
was with me at grandpapa’s death. I was fifteen then, and 
for a year afterward she stayed with me in Lorave ; I loved 
the place so dearly, dearer still after his grave was there, 
and I could not bear to leave it. But Miss Russell had 
no money, and no home. She works for her living, and 
she could not waste her time on me, and the little grand- 
papa could leave me was not enough for both of us. She 
was obliged to look for another situation, and when she 
came over to it — it is in a rector’s family near Staines — I 
came over with her, and she placed me here. My old 
nurse has this farm ; grandpapa bought it for her many 
years ago, when she left us and married. Her husband is 
dead, but she keeps on the farm, and makes bread to send 
into town. It was the only place we knew of, and nurse 
was so delighted to let me have the rooms that I have 
been here ever since.” 

“Poor little thing, what a life I” cried De Yigne, in- 
voluntarily. “How dull you must be, Alma!” 

She raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders. 
Gesticulation was natural to her, and she had caught it 
still more from the Italians at Lorave. 

“Buried alive ! Sylvo to talk to, and the flowers to talk 
to me — that is my society. But wherever I might have 
been, I should have missed him equally, and I can never 
be alone while I have my easel and my books.” 

“ Have you painted these ?” I exclaimed, in surprise, for 
there were masterly strokes in the sketches on the walls 
that would have shamed more than one “Associate.” 

“Yes An Italian artist, spending the summer at 
Lorave. saw me drawing one day ; something as Cimabue 
saw little Giotto, and had me to his studio, and gave me a 


264 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


regular course of instruction. He told me I might equal 
Elizabetta Sirani. I shall never do that, I am afraid, but 
I worship art, and even now I find a very good sale for 
my little sketches; they take them at Ackermanh’s and 
Fae'^’s, and I work hard. Work is a wrong word though, 
it i^ my delight. I go and sketch every day out of doors, 
to catch the winter and summer tints. But I hate winter; 
it is so unkind, so cheerless. I always paint spring and 
summer in my pictures; not your poor pale English sum- 
mer, but summer golden and glorious, with the boughs 
hanging to the ground with the weight of their own 
beauty, and the vineyards and corn-fields glowing with 
their rich promise for the autumn.” 

“Enthusiastic as ever?” laughed De Yigne. “How are 
our friends the fairies, Alma ?” 

“Ho you suppose I shall give news of them to a dis- 
believer?” said Alma, with a toss of her head. “I have 
not forgotten your want of faith. Are you as great a 
skeptic now?” 

“Ten times more so — not only of fairy lore, but of pretty 
well everything else. Fairies are as well worth credence as 
all the other faiths, creeds, and superstitions of the day; I 
would as soon credit Queen Mab as a ‘doctrinal point.’ 
Years add to our skepticism instead of lessening it. What 
do you think of the fairies now ?” 

“Look ! Do you not think I sketched that from sight ?” 
said Alma, turning her easel to him, where she had 
sketched in water-colors a charming Titania — a true 
Titania, such as “on pressed flowers does sleep,” for 
whom “the cowslips tall her pensioners be :” 

Where oxlips and the nodding violets grow. 

Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, 

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. 

Lulled in those flowers with dances and delight. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


265 


the veritable fairy queen of those dainty offsprings of 
romance, who used to meet 

in grove or green, 

By fountain clear or spangled starlight sheen. 

“Ilow splendidly you draw, Alma!” exclaimed De 
Vigne. “If you exhibited at the Water-Color Society, 
you would excite as much wonder as Rosa Bonheur. And 
do these pay you well 

“Yes; at least, what seems so to me.” 

“Pauvre enfant I” smiled De Yigne; her ideas of wealth 
and his were strikingly different. “A friend of mine is a 
great connoisseur of these things. I must show them to 
him some day; but I cannot stay now, for I have an en- 
gagement at two, and it is now striking.” 

“But you will come and see me again,” interrupted 
Alma, beseechingly. “Pray do. You cannot think how 
lonely I am. I have no friends, you know.” 

“Oh yes, I will come,” answered De Yigne. “I have 
much more to hear about you and your pursuits. How 
could you know us, Alma, after so long ?” 

“I did not know Captain Chevasney,” said the little 
lady, with uncomplimentary frankness, “but I knew you 
perfectly. The first picture I could really sketch was one 
of your face, as I remembered it, for Sir Folko. You 
know I always thought you like him. I will show it you 
some day. Besides, grandpapa talked of you so constantly, 
and I was always expecting you to come to Lorave with 
your yacht, as you had promised, that it was impossible 
for me to forget you. I was so grieved when you did not 
notice me in Pall Mall. I called you, but you did not 
hear. You were thinking of that young lady. How 
lovely she was I Who is she ?” 

“Yiolet Molyneux — Lord Molyneux’s daughter. I was 

VOL. I. 23 


266 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNfi 


not thinking of her, though, but that the pair of horses in 
her carriage were not worth half what I heard they gave 
for them. Young ladies are the last things in my thoughts, 
I assure you,” said De Yigne, laughing, as he gave her his 
hand; ‘‘and now, good-by. I am very pleased to have 
found you out. I shall not be long before I find my way 
to tlie farm again — loilhout my bull-dog.” 

The gentle courtesy natural to him from his good breed- 
ing made his manner very vs^inning to women, especially 
when he discarded the cold reserve and cynical sarcasm 
now habitual to him. No wonder that Alma looked grate- 
fully in his face, and bid him, with a radiant smile, not defer 
his promised visit to St. Crucis, as he had done his prom- 
ised yachting to Lorave. She guessed little enough what 
had prevented that yachting to Lorave. 

“ Strange we should have lighted on that child !” said 
he, as we drove to the Dilcoosha. “ She is the same frank, 
impulsive, enthusiastic little thing as when we first saw her. 
She was the heiress of Weive Hurst then; now she has to 
work for her bread. Who can prophesy the ups and downs 
of life? Here am I with forty thousand a year, bored to 
death, and might be happier if I were a private on six- 
pence a day ; and there is a girl, a delicate child, who has 
to earn her critical subsistence by her talents. Boughton 
Tressillian was game to the backbone. Perhaps she in- 
herits some of his pluck — it is to be hoped so — she will 
want it. A woman, young, unprotected, and as attractive 
as she looks, is pretty sure to come to grief some way or 
other. Her very virtues will be her ruin ! She is not one 
of your sensible, prudent, cold, commonplace women, who 
go through the world scathless; Lucretias and Casta Divas, 
too wise to err, too selfish to sacrifice themselves, who win 
from an admiring public a reputation for virtue and honor, 
while their real mainsprings are prudence and egotism. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


26T 


Alma will come to grief, I am afraid. Here, take the 
reins, Arthur, and I will see what her grandfather says. 
Poor old fellow I my conscience will prick me for having 
neglected him. I might have written when I was in 
Scinde, but I thought of nothing there but my troop, and 
‘slaying my fellow-creatures,’ as Sabretasche terms it.” 

He tore open the letter, and gave a long whistle as he 
finished it. 

“What’s the matter?” said 1. 

“ Poor little thing 1 She hasn’t thirty pounds a year, 
and isn’t his grandchild after ail.” 

“Not his grandchild I What do you mean ?” 

“What I say.” 

“His daughter, I suppose?” 

“No; no relation at all. The letter is scrawled to me, 
broken off unfinished ; probably where his hand and strength 
failed him, poor old man I He says my name recurred to 
him as the only person who had not heeded his decline of 
fortune, and the only man of honor whom he could trust. 
Out of his income as consul he contrived to save her a few 
hundreds — voila tout! He must leave her, of course, to 
struggle for herself; and this is what weighs so heavily 
upon him, because, it seems, he adopted this child, who 
was not the slightest relation to him, when she was three 
years old, believing, of course, that he would make her 
one of the richest heiresses in England ; and, according to 
his view of the case, he considers he has done her a great 
wrong. Who she is he does not tell me, except that she 
was a little Italian girl he picked up in Naples. He \^as 
going, no doubt, to add more, as he began the letter by 
saying he wished her secret to be known to some one, and 
having heard much of my mother’s sweet and generous 
character, appealed to her, through me, to aid and serve 
Alma, if she would ; but here the sentence breaks off an- 


268 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


finished. Poor fellow I his strength failed him, I snp- 
pose.’^ 

“Do you think Alma knows it; she calls him her grand- 
father still 

“Can’t say — yet of course she does,” said De Yigne, 
with a cynical smile. “No woman’s curiosity ever allowed 
her to keep an unsealed letter three years and never look 
into it. However, I will not tell her of it till I see whether 
she does or not. Here we are. It will be as well not to 
tell Sabretasche of his little neighbor, eh ? He is such a 
deuced fellow for women, and she would be certain to go 
down before his thousand-and-one accomplishments. Not 
that it would matter much, perhaps; she will be some- 
body’s prey, no doubt, and she might as well be the Colo- 
nel’s as any other man’s, save that he is a little quicker 
fickle than most, knowing better .than most the little value 
of his toys.” 

With which concluding sarcasm De Yigne threw the 
reins to his groom, who met him at the door, and entered 
that abode of perfect taste and epicurean luxury, known 
as the Dilcoosha, where Sabretasche and luncheon were 
waiting for us; and where, after due discussion of Stras- 
bourg pAtes, Comet Hock, Bass, and the news of the day, 
we inspected La Yiolette’s paces, pronounced her pretty 
certain, unless something very unforeseen in the way of 
twitch and opium-ball occurred, to win the Queen’s Cup, 
and drove back to town together, De Yigne to go into the 
XJ. S., Sabretasche to accompany Yiolet Molyneux and her 
mother to a morning concert, and I to call on a certain 
lady who 'had well-nigh broken my heart when it was 
young and breakable, who had exchanged rings with me 
under the Kensington Garden trees, when she was fresh, 
fair, kind-natured Gwen Brandling, and who was now slay- 
ing in town as Madame la Duchesse de la Yieillecour, a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


209 


French ambassador’s wife, black velvet and point replacing 
the muslin and ribbons, dignity in the stead of girlish 
grace, and — helas pour mes beaux jours ! — a fin sourire of 
skilled coquetry in lieu of that heartfelt sunny smile, Gwen’s 
whilom charm. I take it doves are sold by the dozen on 
the altar steps of St. George’s, but — it is true that the 
doves have a strange passion for the gold coins that buy 
them, and would not fly away if they could ! 

N’importel Madame de la Yieillecour and I met as 
became people living in good society ; if less fresh she was 
perhaps more fascinating, and though one begins life tender 
and transparent as Sevres, one is stone-china, luckily, long 
before the finish, warranted never to break at any blows 
whatever. And as I drove ray tilbury from the Duchess’s 
door, I thought, I did not know why, of little Alma Tres- 
sillian, who was just opening the fresh leaves of her book 
of life ; — she looked terribly delicate Sevres now, needing 
gentlest touches, tenderest shelter. When it had passed 
through the furnace and come forth from the fire, would 
the Sevres be hardened or — destroyed 


r 

PART THE TENTH. 

I. 


HOW VIOLET MOLYNEUX TOUCHED OTHER CHORDS THAN 
THOSE IN HER SONG. 

Scarcely any one was in town except a few very early 
birds, heralds of the coming season, and the members, 
victims to an unpitying nation ; but there were still some 
people one knew dotted about in Belgravia and Park Lane, 
others in jointure-houses or villas up “Tamese Ripe,” 


2t0 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


among tbera a very pretty widow, Leila Lady PuffdofiF, 
who dwelt ill the retirement of her dower-house at Twick- 
enham, and enlivened the latter portion of her veuvage by 
matinees musicales, breakfasts, and luncheons for some of 
those dear friends who had been the detestation of le feu 
Pufifdoff, he being old and not a little jealous. To a com- 
bination of all three, Sabretasche, De Yigne, Curly, a man 
called Monckton, and myself, drove in De Yigne’s drag a 
day or two after our rencontre wdth little Alma Tressillian. 

“An amateur affair, isn’t it?” asked De Yigne. “Ar- 
tistes’ morning concerts are bad enough, where Italian 
singers barbarize ‘Annie Laurie ’into an allegro movement 
with shakes and aspeggios, and English singers scream 
Italian with vile British o’s and a’s; but amateur matinees 
musicales, where highly finished young beauties in be- 
coming morning toilettes excruciate one’s ears, whether 
they have melody in their voices or no, just because they 
have been taught by Garcia or Gardoni, are absolutely 
unbearable. Don’t you think so, you worshiper of har- 
mony ?” 

“ I ? Certainly,” responded Sabretasche. “As a rule, 
I shun all amateur things. Where professional people, 
who have applied, sixteen hours a day, all their energies 
and all their capabilities to one subject, even then rarely 
succeed, how is it possible but that the performances of 
those who take up the study as a pastime must be a miser- 
able failure, or at best but second-rate ? Occasionally, 
however, (indeed whenever you see it, but the sight is so 
rare !) talent will do for you without study more than study 
ever will ” 

“As you will show us in your songs this morning, I sup- 
pose ?” laughed Monckton. 

“ If I sang ill I should never sing at all,” replied Sabre- 
tasche, carelessly, with that consciousness of power which 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. . ‘2Tl 

true talent is as sure to have, as it is sure not to have undue 
self-appreciation. “I mean, however, in Miss Molyneux’a 
Aria; even you will admire that, De Yigne.” 

“Violet?” said Monekton. “She does sing tolerably ; 
but I can’t say I like that girl — so much too satirical for a 
woman.” 

“I dare say you may find her so. I know popular 
preachers who consider Thackeray too satirical as an 
author, because he drew the portrait of Charles Honey- 
mann,” said Sabretasche, quietly. 

“Something new to hear the Colonel defending a 
woman’s character,” whispered the injured Monekton to 
me on the back seat. “He generally is more the cause of 
blackening ’em, eh ?” 

“I wish I were like you, Sabretasche,” laughed De 
Yigne, “and could shut myself in, and the world out, of 
my studio while I chipped my marble, or filled my canvas, 
or, like Curly. here, who worships his whiskers, and his 
bottes vernies, and really thinks women delightful to flirt 
with and adore. I wish to Heaven I were an artist, or a 
dandy ” 

“ Or anything but a married man, eh ?” sneered Monck- 
ton. 

Sabretasche’s expressive face grew dark at his words, 
Curly’s languid eye flashed fire, and I gave Monekton a 
pretty hard kick, I can assure you. 

“I wish I were either an artist or a dandy,” pursued De 
Yigne, quietly, though he set his teeth hard, and you could 
see the blood mount even into the pale bronze of his cheek; 
“each has his metier, finds his mission, and employs his 
time. How, poor devil that I am, wdiat can I do ? Read 
whatever trash of technical science and Boswellian biogra- 
phies comes out ; mix in society to bore and to be bored ; 
buy nor^ies and bet on them ; say Gui bvjio? like Sabretasche, 


272 . 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to all of them. Sport, to be sure, there is, and libraries; 
those one can’t tire of ; but beyond, what is there for a 
man to do 

“You can come and see the Puffdofif, and get her longs 
yeux fired at you, for the best of all reasons, that you are 
profoundly insensible to the effect of her artillery,” said I, 
as we turned into the grounds of that fair countess-cZoii;- 
ager, aged twenty-two I 

“ She’s a brilliant-looking woman, De Yigne,” laughed 
Sabretasche. “You should be grateful for being au mieux 
with her.” 

“ Brilliant ? Very much so. But so are the tinsel wings 
at the ballet.” 

“ Hang it, she is very charming, De Vigne !” cried 
Curly. 

“Certainly. Pity the charms are rouge, Kalydor, and 
Oriental tint, and would vanish out of sight if her maid 
and dressing-box were stolen.” 

“ How confoundedly satirical you are 1” 

“No, I am not,” said De Vigne. 

Nor was he. He was only too clear-sighted for his own 
peace. Should we not at thirty take a great pleasure in 
Drury Lane, if we preserved the happy faith we had at ten 
in the witticisms of the clown, the miseries of ill-starred 
pantaloon, the glories of the gorgeous creature in green 
velvet and Spanish boots, the adorable charms of the 
fairy creature in gauze and spangles, who danced before 
the village show in our gleeful childhood ? Passez-moi lo 
mot, the comparison is stale, but a pantomime, with its 
paint, its clap-trap, its worn-out jokes, its grimaced smiles, 
its trap-doors and its artifices, its gay-colored scenes and 
its dirty bustling coulisses, where those who throne it as 
kings and lords upon the boards eat br^ad and cheese with 
aching hearts in the green-room behind, is so like society 1 


GRANVILLE L»E VIGNE. 


273 


Yet if one has been behind it all, and only mentions in 
profoundest pity that its Rachels speak bad grammar off 
the stage; that its Talmas are at heart the saddest of all 
men; that its Meinna Sehroders, with Weber’s and Beeth- 
oven’s smiles upon them, have been trained by privation ; 
that its Adrienne Lecouvrenr, smiling in “Monime,” will 
die with grief for her abandonment by Maurice de Saxe; 
that its Roseval, laughing and singing, runs off the stage 
to tend a broken limb with a breaking heart — if, coming 
from behind the scenes, we recount these things, people 
call us satirical, though we have seen the smiles being man- 
ufactured, and the rouge laid on thick over hollow cheeks I 

Sabrctasche was quite right; it was a treat to hear 
Violet Molyneux’s singing. Every person at the Puff- 
doff’s house flocked out of conservatory, drawing-rooms, 
or cabinets de peinture, at the notes of her clear, rich, 
passionate, bell-like voice. We, just at that time barren 
of prime donne, had heard nothing like it of late; and 
Violet’s voice was really one which, as a professional, 
would have ranked her very high. Besides, there was a 
tone in it, a certain freshness and gladness, mingled with 
a strange pathos and passion, which moved even those 
among her auditors most biases, most fastidious, and most 
ready to sneer, into silence and admiration. 

“That is music,” said De Vigne, in the door of the 
music-room. “If she would sing at morning concerts I 
wpuld forswear them no longer. Look at that fellow ; if 
he be ever really caught at all, it will be by that voice.” 

I looked at that fellow, being Sabretasche, who leaned 
against the organ, close to Violet Molyneux ; his face was 
calm and impassive as ever, but his melancholy eyes were 
fixed upon her with such intense earnestness, that Violet, 
glancing up at him as she sang, colored, despite all her 
Belf-possession, and her voice was unsteady for half a note. 


2T4 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Sabretahche noticed it perhaps, at least his eyes flashed out 
of their melancholy into the look which excited De Yigne^a 
remark. It was quite true, Lauzun though the Colonel 
might be, I believe Violet’s voice pleased him still more 
than her beauty. The latter beguiled the senses, as many 
others had before her; the former beguiled the soul, a far 
rarer charm for him. 

“You came late; half our concert was over,” said 
Violet to him, after luncheon, as they stood talking in a 
miniature winter-garden, one of the whims — and a very 
charming whim, too — of the PufirdofiTs. 

“I came in time to sing what I had promised, and to 
hear what I desired, your ” 

“You did like it?” said Violet, looking up at his radiant 
eyes. 

“Too well to compliment you on it. I ‘liked’ it as I 
liked, or rather I felt it — as I have felt, occasionally, the 
tender and holy beauty of Raphael, the impassioned 
tenderness of the ‘Loves of Rimini,’ the hushed glories 
of a summer night, the mystical chimes of a starlit sea. 
Your voice did me good, as those things did, until the 
feverish fret and noise of practical life wore off their 
influence again.” 

Violet gave a deep sigh of delight. 

“ You make me so happy 1 I often think that the doc- 
trine of immortality has no better plea than the vague 
yearning for something unseen and unconceived, the un- 
uttered desire which rises in us at the sound of true music. 
I have heard music at which I could have shed more bitter 
tears than any I have known, for I have had no sorrow, 
and which answered the restless passions of my heart better 
than any human mind that ever wrote.” 

“ Quite true ; and that is why, to me, music is one of the 
strangest gifts to man. Painting creates, bu^ creates by 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2T5 


imitation. If a man imagine an angel, he must paint from 
the woman’s face that he loves best — the Fornarina sat for 
the Madonna. If he paint a god, he must take a man for 
model; anything different from man would be grotesque. 
We never see a Jupiter or a Christ that is anything more 
than a fiercely-handsome, or a sadly-handsome, man. Music, 
on the contrary, creates from a spirit- world of its own : the 
fable of Orpheus and its lyre is not wholly a fable. In the 
passionate crash and tumult of an overture, in the tender 
pathos of one low tenor note, in the full swell of a Magni- 
ficat, in the low sigh of a Miserere, the human heart throws 
off the frippery and worry of the world, the nobler impulses, 
the softer charity, the unuttered aspirations, that are buried, 
yet still live, beneath so much that is garish and contempt- 
ible — wake up, and a man remembers all he is and all he 
might have been, and grieves, as the dwellers in Arcadia 
grieved over their exile, over his better nature lost.” 

Ah,” answered Yiolet, her gay spirits saddened by the 
tone in which Sabretasche, ordinarily so careless, light, 
nonchalant, and unruffled, spoke, “if we were always what 
we are in such moments how different would the world be I 
How ashamed we are of our petty quarrels and impulses, 
how far we are lifted from the rancor and the flitting trifles 
which mar all the beauty of human life I On the spur of 
such combined tranquillity and exaltation as music creates 
we are so much truer, so much nobler! We realize the 
temptations of others, we feel how little right we, with so 
much sin among us, have to dare to judge another. If 
human nature lasted what it is in its best moments, poets 
would have no need to fable of an Eden.” 

Sabretasche looked down on her long and earnestly: 

“Do you know that you are to me something as music 
is to you ? When I am with you I am truer and better. 
1 breathe a purer atmosphere You make me for the time 


276 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


being feel as I used to feel in my golden days. You bring 
me back enthusiasm, belief in human nature, noble aspira- 
tions, purer tastes, tenderer thoughts — in a word, you bring 
me back youth I” 

Violet lifted her eyes to his, full of the happiness his 
words gave her. Sabretasche’s hand rested on hers as 
she played with a West Indian creeper, clinging round 
the sides of a vase of myrtles. The color wavered in the 
Parian fairness of her face ; her eyes and lips were tremu- 
lous with a vague sense of delight and expectation, but 
Sabretasche took his hand away with a short quiok sigh, 
and set himself to bending the creeper into order. 

There was a dead silence, a disappointed shad jw stole 
unconsciously over Violet’s tell-tale face. She looked up 
quickly : 

“Why do you always talk of youth as a thing passed 
away from you? It is such folly. You are now in your 
best years.” 

“It is past and gone from my heart.” 

“But might it not have a resurrection ?” 

“ It might, but it may not.” 

Violet mused a moment over the anomalous reply. 

“What curse have you on you?” she said, involuntarily. 

Sabretasche turned his eyes on her, filled with unutter- 
able sadness : 

“Do not rouse my demon; let him sleep while he can. 
But, Violet, when you hear about in the world of which 
you and I are both votaries — as hear you have done and 
will do — many tales of my past and my present, many 
reports and scandals circulated by my friends, believe 
them or not as you like by what you know of m» ; but 
believe, at the least, that I am neither so light-hearted 
nor so hard-hearted as they consider me. You are kind 
enough to honor me with your — your interest; you will 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2tl 

never guess how dearly I prize it; but there are thbgs 
in ray career which I cannot reveal to you, and against 
interest in rae and my fate I warn you; it can bring you 
no happiness, for it can never go beyond friendship!” 

It was a strange speech from a man to a woman, es- 
pecially from a man famous for his conquests to a woman 
famous for her beauty I 

He saw a shiver pass over Violet’s form, and the delicate 
rose hue of her cheeks faded utterly. He sighed bitterly 
as he added, the blue veins rising in his calm white fore- 
head : 

“None to love me have I; I never had, I never may 
have !” 

Great tears gathered slowly in Violet’s eyes, and, despite 
all her self-control, fell down on the glowing petals of the 
AVest Indian flowers. 

“But you will let me know more of you than any one 
else does?” she said, in a hurried, broken voice. “You 
will not, at least, forbid me your friendship?” 

“ Friendship — friendship !” repeated Sabretasche, with a 
strange smile. “You do not know what an idle word, 
what a treacherous salve, what a vain impossibility is 
friendship between men and women. Yet if you are will- 
ing to give me yours I will do my best to merit it, and to 
keep myself to it. Now let us go. I like too well to be 
with you to dare be with you long.” 

He gave her his arm, they lounged together into a cabi- 
net de peinture, and criticised with the others a little Mieris 
newly added to the collection. Young ladies remark what 
high spirits Violet Molyneux has; too high, they think. 
Married women observe what a shocking flirt Vivian Sa- 
bretasche is; he is much more attentive to the Fuffdoff 
than to Violet, whom he has been going after for the last 
^wo months, but evidently cares no more for than for his 

24 


VOL. I, 


278 


GRANVILLE DE V'IGNE. 


Boiled gloves. Mammas and chaperones inquire if they 
may congratulate Lady Molyneux on the rumors already 
afloat regarding her daughter’s engagement to Colonel 
Sabretasche, and the Yiscountess cries, “ My dear Lady 
Fitzspy I that flirt ? Heaven forefend I He may wish it, 

but I And, besides, Violet’s affections are most happily 

centered in a very different quarter.” Whereat, the mammas 
and chaperones whose daughters have not sung so well at 
the amateur concert are disconcerted, knowing that the 
young Duke of Regalia is the enfant de la maison in 
Lowndes Square. So our friends use their lorgnons, and 
BO much do they see of any of us, with all their skill at 
finesses, divination, and intrigues, spun on behind the 
backs of fans and down ivory parasol-handles. 


II. 


“l’amitie est l’amour sans ailes.” 

“ What does Sabretasche mean with Molyneux’s daugh- 
ter ?” said De Yigne to me in that same cabinet de peinture, 
De Yigne having only just escaped from the harpy’s clutch 
of the little Countess’s fairy fingers. 

“How the devil should I tell? He’s a confounded in- 
constant fellow, you know. He’s always flirting with some 
woman or other.” 

“ Flirtation doesn’t make men look as he looked while 
he listened to her. Flirtation amuses. Sabretasche is not 
amused here, but rather, I should say, intensely worried.” 

“What should worry him? He could marry the girl if 
he wished.” 

“How can you tell?” 

“Well, I suppose so. The Molyneux would let him 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


279 


bave her fast enough. Her mother wants to get her off; 
she don’t like two milliners’ bills in Regent Street and the 
Palais Royal. But you interesting yourself in a love 
affair I What a Saul among the prophets !” 

“ Spare your wit, Arthur. I never meddle with such 
tinder, I assure you. I am not over fond of my fellow- 
creatui;es, but I don’t hate them intensely enough to help 
them to marry. I say, have you not been sufficiently bored 
here ? The concert is over. Let us go, shall we ?” 

“ With pleasure. I say, you have not paid your promised 
visit to little Tressillian. ’Tisn’t far; we might walk over, 
eh?” 

“So we will. Are you after poor Alma’s chevelure 
doree already?” laughed De Vigne. “Make her mistress 
of Longholme, Chevasney, and I’ll give her away to you 
with pleasure. I won’t be a party to other conditions, for 
her grandfather’s sake — her guardian’s sake, rather. By 
the way, I must make out whether she knows or not that 
the relationship was a myth.” 

“Thank you. I have no private reasons for proposing 
the call, except the always good and excellent one of pass- 
ing the time and seeing a pretty woman. There is the 
Puffdoff coming after you again. Let's get away while 
we can.” 

We were soon out of that little bijou of a dower-house 
that shrined the weeds and wiles of the late Puffdoff’a 
handsome countess, and smoking our cigars, as we walked 
across to Richmond. We found her old nurse at the gate, 
a nice, neat, pleasant old woman, who told us Miss Alma, 
as she called her, was in- doors. 

“Ah, sir, I remember you when you were a coming over 
to Weive Hurst when my poor dear master was alive, and 
in his own home, that those brutes took away from him. 
God forgive me for calling ’em so, but they were brutes, 


280 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


with lies m their mouths and Bibles in their hands. When 
that cruel wretch Sir John Lacquers came down to stay 
witn my master, when Miss Alma was little, he took my 
master to task for not having family sermons to read to 
the servants every night, and he was talking the whole 
time he was eating of his French dishes and drinking of his 
French wines — and didn’t he like ’em, too, sir! — of the 
beauty of giving up the things of this world. But that’s 
always the way with them that preach — they never practice, 
sir, never; and now they say that wretch is a living in 
France, sir, as grand as a duke, and that poor dear child 
is wearing her pretty eyes out. Don’t let her do it, sir; 
pray don’t !” 

At which De Yigne laughed, and went into the house 
to see the poor dear child in question. He opened the 
door unannounced, for the best of all reasons that there 
was no one there to announce him. Alma was sitting at 
her easel, with her back to the door, painting earnestly, 
with little Sylvo at her side. She was dressed prettily, in- 
expensively I have no doubt, but somehow more pictur- 
esquely than many of the women in hundred guinea 
dresses and point worth a dowry — the picturesqueness of 
artistic taste, and innate refinement which gave her the 
brilliance and grace of a picture. She turned rapidly at 
the closing of the door, sprang up, and ran toward him 
w’ith that rapidity and impulsiveness which always made 
her, in that respect, seem much younger than she was. 

“Ah! you have come at last I I began to think you 
would cheat me as you cheated me of the yachting trip to 
Lorave ; and yet I had faith in you. I thought you would 
not disappoint me.” 

“No; but I shall scold you,” said De Yigne, “for sitting 
there, wearing your eyes out — as Mrs. Lee phrases it — 
over your easel. Why do you do it?” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


281 


*‘It is my only companion,” pleaded Alma. “I like U 
BO much. With my brush I can escape away into an ideai 
world, and shut out the real and actual, with all its harsh- 
ness, trials, and privations. You know the sun shines only 
for me upon canvas; and besides,” she added, with a gay 
smile, “to take a ])ractical view of it, I have little or no 
money, and I must make what talent I have into gold.” 

“ Poor little thing 1” exclaimed De Yigne. Malgre lui, 
It struck him, who had flung about thousands at his pleas- 
ure ever since he was a boy, as so singular, and as some- 
how so unjust, that this girl, young as she was, should 
have to labor for her living with the genius with which 
nature had endowed her so royally — genius the divine, the 
god-giver, the signet- seal, so rare, so priceless, with which 
nature marks the few who are to ennoble and sanctify the 
mass. 

“Ah I I am a poor little thing!” repeated Alma, with 
a moue mutine indicative of supreme pitie d'elle-meme and 
indignation at her fate. “I should love society; I see 
nothing but nurse and Sylvo. I love fun ; I have nobody 
to talk it to but the goldfinch. I hate solitude, and I am 
always alone. I should like beautiful music, beautiful 
pictures, gardens, statues, conservatories, luxuries, all the 
agremens of life. This quiet life is not at all my role; I 
vegetate in it.” 

“More honor to you to bear it so well, Miss Tressil- 
lian,” said I. 

“Oh, I don’t bear it well,” interrupted Alma. “I some- 
times get as impatient as a bird beating its wings against 
a cage ; I grow as restless in its monotony as you can 
fancy ; I want to enjoy myself So I am not a bit of a 
philosopher, and never shall be.” 

“Life will make you one in spite of yourself,” said De 
Yigne. 


24 * 


252 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


‘‘Never! If I ever come to rose-leaves, I will lie down 
on them coiite que coiite. As long as I can only get a 
straw mattress, there is not much virtue in renunciation.” 

“But there are cankerous worms in rose-leaves,” smiled 
De Yigne. 

“But who would ever enjoy the roses if they were always 
remembering that? Where is the good ?” 

“You little epicurean!” laughed De Yigne, looking at 
her amusedly. His remembrance of her as a child made 
him treat her with a certain gentle familiarity, very differ- 
ent to his usual sarcastic hauteur with young ladies of her 
age. “You would have a brief summer like the butter- 
flies. That sort of summer costs one dear when the butter- 
fly lies dying on the brown autumn leaves, and envies the 
bee housed safely at home.” 

“Nhmporte!” cried the little lady, recklessly. “The 
butterfly, at. least, has enjoyed life, and the bee, I would 
bet, goes on humming and bustling all the year round, 
never knowing whether the fuchsias are red or white, as 
long as there is honey in them ; only looking in orchises 
with an eye to business, and never giving a minute in his 
breathless toil to scent the heliotropes or kiss the blue- 
bells for their beauty’s sake.” 

“Possibly not; but when the fuchsias and orchises, 
blue-bells and heliotropes, are withered and dried, and 
raked away by ruthless gardeners for the unpoetic destiny 
of making leaf mould, and the ground is frozen, and the 
trees are bare, and the wind whistles over the snow — how 
then ? Which is best off, butterly or bee !” 

“Hold your tongue!” laughed Alma. “You put me in 
mind of those horrible moral apologues, and that detest- 
able incitement to supreme selfishness, ‘La cigale ayant 
chante tout I’et^,’ where the ant is made out a most praise- 
worthy person, but appears to me simply cruel and moan 


GRANVILLE DE VIGXE. 


283 


But to answer you is easy enough. What good does the 
bee get from his hard work? Has his honey taken away 
from him for other people’s eating, and is smoked out of 
his house, poor little thing, by human monsters, whom, if 
he knew his power, he could sting to death I The bntter- 
tly, au contraire, enjoys himself to the last, dies in the 
course of nature, and leaves others to enjoy themselves 
after him.’' 

“You did not lose your tongue in Lorave, Alma?” said 
De Yigne, with a grave air of solicitous interest. 

With the little Tressillian he had a little of his old fun, 
something of his old laugh. 

“No, indeed ; and I should be very sorry if I had, for 
I love talking.” 

“You need not tell us that,” smiled De Yigne. 

“I will never talk to you again,” cried Alma, with 
supreme dignity; “or, rather, I never would if I were 
not too magnanimous to avenge an insult by such enor- 
mous punishment.” 

“To yourself. Just so. You are quite right,” said De 
Yigne, with an amused smile. “I only know one young 
lady who can equal you in that line, and she is your St. 
James’s Street friend. Miss Molyneux.” 

“ Ah ! she would like talking, by her face ; and she must 
talk well, too.” 

“Yes. Something in your style; as vehement and effer- 
vescent as a glass of champagne, and as fast as a twenty 
minutes’ burst, up wind.” 

“Do you admire her?” asked Alma, quickly. 

“Certainly. All men must. She is very lovely.” 

“Yes; it is a face to dream of. And she must be very 
happy,” added Alma, with a sigh of envy. 

“I dare say she is; she looks so.” 

“Have you seen her to-day?” 


284 


GRANVILLE 1)E VIGNE. 


“ Yea. Chevasney and I are just come from a matinee 
musicale at Twickenham, where she was the lionne.” 

“How I wish I were in your society,” cried Alma, pas- 
sionately. 

“I wish you were,” said De Yigne. “You are not made 
for solitude, nor to derive any pleasure from ‘blushing un- 
seen,’ and ‘wasting your sweetness on the desert air.’ You 
are a true woman, I guess, Alma, and would enjoy shining, 
scintillating, slaying, and conquering. All women do who 
can, and those who cannot make a virtue of necessity, and 
renounce the admiration that refuses to come to them with 
as good a grace as they can muster; but they long for it 
all the same. But take courage, petite. You were born 
in that society — you will shine in it some day, I make no 
doubt.” 

“If I could make a name like Rosa Bonheur, I might, 
and then you would admire me as much as you do Miss 
Molyneux.” 

De Yigne laughed. 

“What are you painting now, Alma? May we see?” 

“I was drawing you,” she answered, tranquilly, turning 
the easel toward him. 

It was a really wonderful likeness from memory, done in 
pastels. She had admirably caught the high-bred and 
severe beauty of his face, and she had caught, what was 
much more difficult, the calm hauteur of his features, tho 
suppressed passions, veiled under impenetrable reserve, 
which slumbered in his eyes, while there yet lingered round 
the grave proud lines of hrs mouth a shadow of the smile 
which now came so rarely there, but when it did, gave the 
lie to the coldness of its expression in repose. 

“My likeness I By Jove I” cried De Yigne ; “you flatter 
me shockingly, Alma. What on earth put it into your 
head, petite, to do that?’’ 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


285 


“I knew you would make a splendid picture — your face 
is beautiful,” said Alma, tranquilly. 

Whereupon De Vigne went straight off into a fit of 
laughter, the first real, cordially amused laughter, with a 
touch of the old merry ring in it, that I had heard since 
bis marriage-day. 

“Why do you laugh ?” said Alma, indignantly; “I only 
tell you the truth. Your face is perfect by the rules 
of art,” 

At which gratifying assurance De Yigne laughed still 
more. The girl amused him, as Richelieu’s and Mon- 
taigne’s little cats amused them when they laid down the 
scepter and the pen and tied the string to their kittens’ 
cork. And thinking of her still merely as Tressillian’s 
little granddaughter, he was not on his guard with her as 
with other women, and treated her with a cordiality and 
freedom more like his old than his present manners. For 
De Yigne was a true gentleman, every inch of him; and 
where he might have been careless and distant to Yiolet 
Molyneu.x, an aristocratic belle, he was carefully courteous 
and kind to Alma Tressillian, poor, unprotected, and work- 
ing for her own livelihood. 

“Well, Alma, I am extremely obliged to you. You 
have made a much handsomer fellow of me than Maclise 
would have done, I am afraid,” said he, smiling; “and if 
ever my picture is wanted side by side with Wellington’s, 
I hope, for the sake df creating an impression on posterity, 
that you will be kind enough to paint it for me.” 

“It is no handsomer than you are yourself,” said Alma, 
lesolute to maintain her own opinion; “is it, Captain Che- 
vasney ? It is too bad of you to laugh so, but that is just 
like your sex’s ingratitude.” 

“Don’t abuse us,” said De Yigne; “that is so stale a 
stage-trick with women. They are eternally running after 


286 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE.' 


US, and eternally vowing that they would not stir a step 
for any of us. They spend their whole existence in trying 
to catch us, but their whole breath reiterating that they 
only take us out of compassion. If I hear a lady abuse 
or find fault with us, I know that her grapes ‘sont trop 
verts, et bons pour des goujats.’ ” 

Alma laughed : 

“Very probably. But I don’t abuse you. Au con- 
traire, I prefer gentlemen to my own sex ; and I have a 
right, for I have had much more kindness from them. I 
prefer them, too, for many other things. Your code of 
honor is far better than ours.” 

“The generality of women have no notion of honor at 
all,” said De Yigne; “they tell falsehoods and circulate 
scandals without being called to account for it, and the 
laxity of honor in trifles that they learn in the nursery 
and school-room-s corrodes their sense of right toward 
others in all their after-life. Men err very often from 
passion and ambition, or high temper; but women’s faults 
almost always spring from petty motives : spite, malice, 
love of outshining their neighbor, pleasure in small in- 
trigues, jealousy of prettier rivals. Their sphere is little, 
their vices and their vanities are little likewise. A boy at 
school is soon taught that, however lax he may be in other 
things, it is ‘sneaky’ to peach, and learns a rough sort of 
Spartan honor; a girl, on the contrary, tells tales of her 
sisters unreproved, and hears mammd in her drawing-room 
take away the character of a ‘dearest friend’ whom she 
sees her meet the next moment with a caress and an endear- 
ment. But modern society is too ‘religious’ to remember 
to be honorable, and is too occupied with proclaiming its 
‘morality’ to have any time to give to common honesty 

“As Sir John Lacquers taught us I” 

“Sir John Lacquers and scores like him, whose ‘slips 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


287 


are passed over because their scrip is inscribed with a largo 
text, and pilgrim’s purse full of almighty dollars. I think 
of publishing a ‘Manual of Early Lessons for Eminent 
Christians:’ I. Do good so that not only your right hand 
knows it, but all your neighborhood likewise. II. Give as 
it shall be given unto you, and not unless you know it will 
be. III. Strain very hard at a sin the size of a gnat if it 
be your poor relation’s, and swallow one the size of a camel 
if it be your patron’s. lY. Never pray in your closet, as 
no one will be the wiser, but go as high as you can on the 
house-top, that society may think you the holiest man in 
Israel. Y. Borrow of your friend without paying him, 
because he will not harm you, but be careful to give good 
interest to strangers, because they may have the law on 
you. YI. Judge very severely, that gaining applause for 
your condemnation of others you may contrive to hide 
your own shortcomings. YII. Eat pates de foie gras in 
secrecy, but have jours maigres in public, that men who 
cannot see you in secret may reward you openly. I could 
write a whole paraphrase of the Gospel as used and trans- 
lated by the ‘ Church of England,’ and other elect of the 
kingdom of Heaven ; an election, by the way, exceedingly 
like that of Themistocles, where every man writes down 
his own name first, entirely regardless of lack of right or 
qualification for the honor.” 

“But different in this respect,” said Alma, “that there 
the generals did remember to put Themistocles after them, 
whereas the shining lights of the different creeds are a 
great deal too occupied with securing their own future 
comfort to think of drawing any of their confreres up with 
them The churches all take a cross for their symbol; 
they would be nearer the truth if they took the beam with- 
out the transverse, for egotism is much nearer their point 
than self-sacrifice. But will you look at my pet picture^ 


288 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


I know I need not ask you to tell me candidly what you 
like and don’t like in it.” 

The picture she spoke of stood with its face to the wall. 
As she turned it round, De Vigne and I gave an involun- 
tary exclamation of surprise, it so far surpassed anythiLg 
we should have fancied a girl of her age could have accom- 
plished. It was in water-colors, but her master had been 
one of the first artists in Rome, and she had acquired under 
him a brilliance and delicacy of finish rarely seen. The pic- 
ture was one not possible to criticise chilly by exacting 
rules of art and of perspective. One looked at it as 
Murillo looked at the first Madonna of his wonderful 
mulatto, not to discuss critically, but to admire the genius 
stamped upon it, to admire the vivid breathing vitality, 
the delicate grace, and wonderful power marked upon its 
canvas. 

De Vigne looked at it silently while Alma spoke; he 
continued silent some minutes after she had ceased. He 
was not rassotte of art as Sabretasche was, but he was 
passionately fond of talent wherever he found it, and he was 
a good judge of painting; no one could have imposed a 
mediocre thing upon him. He stood silently, as I say, 
looking at her work ; then he turned suddenly ; 

“Alma, if you choose, you can be as great a woman as 
Elizabeth Sirani — a greater than Rosa Bonheur, because 
what she gives to horses and cows you will give to human 
nature. Be content. Whatever sorrows or privations come 
to you, you will have God’s best gift, which no man can 
take away, the greatest prize in life — genius I” 

Alma looked up at him, her blue eyes brilliant as dia- 
monds and dark as a summer sky at midnight, her whole 
face flushed, her lips trembling with delight. 

“You think so. Thank God I I would have died to 
hear you say that 1” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2S9 


Better live to prove it,” said De Yigne, mournfully. 
Her enthusiasm struck a sad chord in his heart. “Your 
picture is both well conceived and well carried out; it tells 
its own story; the imagining of it is poetic, the treatment 
artistic. There are faults, no doubt, but I like it too well 
to look out for them, and for your age I regard it as a 
marvel. Will you let me have it at my house a little 
while? I have some friends who are artists, others who 
are really learned cognoscenti, and I should like’ to hear 
their opinion on it.” 

“Will you keep it?” asked Alma, with the first shyness 
I had seen in her. “If you would hang it anywhere in 
your house — an attic, or anything — and just look at it now 
and then, I shall be so glad. Will you?” 

“I will keep it with pleasure, my dear child,” answered 
De Vigne, with a surprised smile; “but I will keep it as 
I would Landseer’s, or Mulready’s, by being allowed the 
pleasure of adding it to my collection. Y'our picture is 
worth ” 

“Oh, don’t talk of ‘worth I’” cried Alma, vehemently. 
“ Take it — take it, as I give it to you, with all my heart. I 
am so glad to give you anything, you were so kind to himP^ 

And at the remembrance of her grandfather poor little 
Alma leaned against her easel, covered her bright eyes 
with her hands, and sobbed aloud, unrestrainedly, and 
passionately, like her nature. She was too instinctively 
well-bred, however, not to do her best to suppress them, 
and, brushing away her tears, she looked up at De Vigne. 

“Don’t be angry with me, I can’t help it when I think 
of grandpapa; he loved me so much, and I have nobody 
to love me now. Did he say anything in his letter that I 
might hear ?” 

De Vigne turned quickly : 

“Did you not read it? It was unsealed.” 

VOL. I. 25 « 


290 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Read it? No I Why, it was addressed to you. You 
could not think for a moment that another person’s letter 
was less sacred to me because it happened to be unsealed I 
That is not your own code, I should say. What right have 
you to suppose me more dishonorable than yourself?” 

Her eyes sparkled dangerously, the color was hot in her 
cheeks, the imputation had roused her spirit, and really 
her fiery indignation was as becoming as it was amusing. 

“I beg your pardon. I was wrong,” said De Yigne. 
“You have a man’s sense of honor, not a woman’s. I am 
glad of it. Your grandpapa says very little. You say 
he died on the morning of the 10th of May; my letter was 
written on the evening of the 9th, and his powers failed 
him before he finished it. It was merely to ask me if I 
met you to be your friend. It is little enough I can ever 
aid you in, and my friendship will be of little use to you, 
but, such as it is, it will be yours, if you like to take it.” 

She held her hand out to him by way of answer ; there 
were too many tears in her voice for her to trust herself to 
say anything. 

“You do not remember your parents at all?” asked De 
Yigne. 

She shook her head : 

“I remember no one but grandpapa, and no home but 
Weive Hurst. Sometimes I have a sort of memory of a 
woman with fair hair, whom I called mamma, but whom I 
was afraid of, and of a place not unlike Lorave, with myr- 
tles and orange-trees ; but it must be only the memory of 
a dream, I think, for nurse told me both papa and mamma 
died when I was a baby, and that grandpapa could never 
bear me to mention them to him : I don’t know why. How 
happy I was at Weive Hurst I I wonder if I shall ever be 
like that again ?” 

“To be sure you will,” said De Yigne, kindly “You 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


291 


have a capacity for happiness, and are gay under heavy 
clouds; at eighteen no one has said good-by to all the 
sunshine of life. 1 must say good-by, though, or I shall 
not be back in town in time for mess. The hours slip 
away fast in chat ; but promise me one thing, that, till I 
see you again, you will not ruin your eyesight over that 
easel before and after it is light. Only paint while the 
day is bright; you will do yourself more injury than you 
dream of in that over-close application. Walk every day 
that is fine, and give yourself some hours of delassement. 
You are fond of reading?” 

“Passionately; but I read so much as a child, that I am 
almost blasee de litterature. I seem to have read, in Eng- 
lish, French, and Italian, all that is really worth reading — 
all that is now in my reach at least, for now the rare old 
works and the best modern are not attainable, for the circu- 
lating libraries do not keep them. I am very fond of the 
French memoirs. What is more amusing than Saint-Simon 
and De Montespan ? And I like metaphysical and psycho- 
logical works — Buckle’s, and Bain’s, and Stuart Mill’s.” 

De Vigne ^iled. “As your taste, like your notions of 
honor, are a man’s and not a woman’s, and someway re- 
semble mine, perhaps my library can suit you better than 
the circulating ones. We will see I And now good-by, 
Miss Tressillian.” 

“Don’t call me Miss Tressillian, pray,” cried Alma, plain- 
tively; “that is something quite new, and very horrible; 
everybody calls me Alma, and so must you. Good-by, 
and thank you much. Don’t go and see Miss Molyneiix 
and forget all about me. She has plenty of friends, you 
know, and I have none.” 

“ That little Tressillian is charming,” said I, as we left 
the house. “ Don’t you think her very amusing ?” 

''Yes,” said De Vigne, with a smile, “it does amuse ona 


t92 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to hear her ; it is refreshing, after the vapid inanities and 
limited intelligence of ‘finished’ young ladies, to find a 
little thing who can talk and think like that. She is 
perfectly original, certainly, and it is a pity there are not 
more of the stamp.” 

“I like her,” said I, “because she has the gayety, frank- 
ness, and abandon of a child, with the quick wit, satire, and 
knowledge of a woman of the world, and that union is un- 
commonly rare. I wish there were more women like 
Victor Hugo’s friend, ‘ Homme par la pensee et femme par 
le coeur.’ The mistake they always make is, in imagining 
their education finished when in truth it has only just 
begun. What a girl learns up to sixteen or seventeen is 
only the merest A B C of knowledge. They are not 
allowed to read this, because it is ‘improper;’ nor that, 
because it is ‘irreligious;’ nor the other, because it is ‘not 
fit for young persons;’ till the result is, chat they read 
nothing — great writers not being exactly accustomed to 
suppress their opinions, mince their words, and shut out 
human nature, to suit the capacities of school- girls or the 
pruderies of school-mistresses. If their education is so 
limited, how should their minds choose but be limited also? 
Give me a woman like our little friend yonder, who has 
something of our own range of studies and ideas, to whom 
one can talk on equal terms, and not have to go down from 
all subjects of interest, or value, to the gathering together 
of on dits and the consideration of bagatelles, as uninter- 
esting as they are unimproving.” 

“ Little Alma makes you quite eloquent,” said De Vigne, 
smiling. “I fully agree with you, if women were more 
capable of participation in our thoughts and studies, we 
should not seek their society as we now do, only to make 
love to them. Women complain that their husbands, ana 
brothers, and fathers, leave them for clubs and men’s 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


293 


society. The fault lies chiefly in themselves. It is only a 
lover, and only then one in the first ‘rosy flush’ of enchant- 
ment, who does not weary of soft lips that can only utter 
monosyllables, and almond eyes that can only look a vac- 
uous ‘Plait-il?’ to all his allusions. Alma is original; 
the worse for her, poor child 1 Women* will hate, and men 
take advantage of her; 'if she were in society, our sex 
would go mad about her, and her own mad against her. 
I wonder what will become of her. I doubt if she will be 
happy; your exceptional natures scarcely ever are, though 
certainly she is lively enough under difficulties, with none 
of the amusements natural to her age. I wish you’d 
marry her, Arthur — it would be such a kindness. And 
yet I wouldn’t ask you such a sacrifice, you’re too good for 
a married man.” 

“Bien oblige, I never intend to be; but if I ever should, 
I hope my wife would not look on you with such admiring 
eyes as Alma does.” 

He laughed. “ My dear fellow I do you expect to have 
a Guenevere who has no Launcelot? I shouldn’t have 
thought you . so Quixotic. If ever you marry, you must 
make up your mind to play second ; and if your wife has 
no more harmful penchant than the little Tressillian’s will 
ever be for me, you may congratulate yourself indeed !” 

The morning after, while De Vigne was breakfasting, 
the cart that brought in Mrs. Lee’s home-made bread to 
town left at his house Alma’s picture; she had looked, I 
suppose, for his address in the Court Guide, and remem- 
bered her promise, though I am afraid the recipient of her 
gift had forgotten the subject altogether. 

When it came, however, he hung it in a good light, and 
pointed it out to Sabretasche, who dined with him that 
night, to meet a mutual Paris friend. 

“What do you think of that picture, Colonel?” he said, 
25 * 


2^4 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


as we came the drawing-room for a rubber. Whist 
was no great favorite with De Yigne; he preferred the 
rapidity and exciting whirl of loo or lansquenet ; but he 
played it well, and Sabretasche and De Cassagnac were es- 
pecially fond of it. It suited the Colonel to lean back in 
a soft chair, and make those calm, subtle combinations. 
He said the game was so deliciously tranquil and silent I 

Sabretasche set down his coffee-cup, put his glass in his 
eye, and lounged up to it. 

“Of this water-color? I like it exceedingly. Where 
did you get it? It is not the style of any one I know; it 
is more like one of your countrymen’s, Cassagnac, eh ? It 
wants toning down ; the light through that stained window 
is a trifle too bright, but the boy’s face is perfect. I would 
give something to have idealized it; and the hair is as soft 
as silk. I like it extremely, De Vigne. Where did you 
get it ?” 

“ I picked it up by accident. It pleased my eye, and I 
wanted to know if my eye led me right. I know you are 
a great connoisseur of those things.” 

“There is true power in it, and an exquisite delicacy of 
touch. The artist is young, isn’t he? Do you know 
him ?” 

“Slightly. He works for his livelihood, and is only 
eighteen.” 

“Eighteen? By Jove I if the boy goes on as he has 
begun he will beat Maclise and Ingres. Has he ever tried 
his hand at oils ?” 

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.” 

“ It’s a pity he shouldn’t. He works for his livelihood, 
you say? If he will do me a picture as good as this, 
leaving the subject to himself, I will give him fifty guineas 
for it, if he thinks that sufficient. Some day, when we have 
nothing better to do, you will take me to his studio--a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


295 


garret in Poland Street, probably, is it not ? Those poor 
devils ! How they live on bread and cheese and a pipe of 
bird’s-eye, I cannot conceive I If +he time ever come when 
I have my turbot and hock no longer, I shall resort to an 
overdose of morphia. What is the value of life when life 
is no longer enjoyment?” 

“Yet,” suggested He Yigne, “if only those were alive 
who enjoyed living, the earth would be barren very speedily, 
I fancy.” 

“That depends on how you read enjoyment,” said He 
Cassagnac. 

“Enjoyment is easily enough defined — taking pleasure 
in things, and having things in which to take pleasure. 
Some men have the power to enjoy, and not the opportu- 
nity; others the opportunity, and not the power; the com- 
bination of both makes the enjoyment, I take it.” 

“But enjoyment is a very different thing to different 
men. Enjoyment, for Sabretasche, lies in soirees, like the 
Gore House, or Madame de Sable’s, wine as good as your 
claret, women as pretty as La Violette, good music, good 
painting, and immeasurable dolce. Enjoyment lies, for 
Professor Owen, in the fossil tooth of an ichthyosaurus; 
for an Italian lazzarone, in sun, dirt, and macaroni; for 
a woman, in dress, conquests, and tall footmen ; for the 
Tipton Slasher, in the belt, undisputed : enjoyments are as 
myriad as the stars.” 

“I know what you mean, my dear fellow,” said Sabre- 
tasche, dropping his eye-glass, and taking up his cup again. 
“You mean that Hodge, the bricklayer, goes home covered 
with whitewash, sits down to Hutch cheese, with the brats 
screaming about, with the same relish as I sit down to my 
very best-served dinner. It is true, so far, that I should 
ratther be in purgatory than in whitewash, should turn sick 
at the cheese, murder the children, and kill my own self 


296 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


afterward, and that Hodge, by dint of habit and blunted 
ssenses, can support life where I should end it in pure self- 
defense. But I do not believe that Hodge enjoys himself 
— how should he, poor wretch I with not a single agrement 
of life ? He does not know all he misses, and he is not 
much better than the beast of the field ; but at the same 
time he only endures life, he can’t be said to enjoy it. I 
agree with De Yigne, that there is but one definition of 
enjoyment, and the ‘two handfuls, with quiet and content- 
ment of spirit,’ is a poetic myth, for poverty and enjoy- 
ment can by no means ever run in tandem.” 

“And contentment is another myth,” added De Yigne. 
“If a man has all he wants, he is contented, because he 
has no wish beyond, and is a happy man ; if he has not 
what he wants, and is conscious of something lacking, he 
cannot be called contented, for he is not so.” 

“Just so. I don’t look to be contented, that is not in 
the lot of man ; all I ask are the agremens and refinements 
of life, and without them life is a curse. Neither Diogenes, 
limiting himself to cabbages and water, nor Alexander, 
drunk with the conquest of the empires, were one bit more 
contented at heart than the other. Discontent prompted 
the one to quit mankind and cast off wealth, the other to 
rule mankind and amass wealth.” 

“ And, after all, there is no virtue in contentment, since 
contentment is satisfaction in one’s lot; there is far more 

virtue in endurance — strong, manful, steady endurance 

of a fate that is adverse, and one admits to be such, but 
against which one still fights hard. Patience is all very 
well, but pluck is better,” said De Yigne. “The tables 
are set. Shall we cut for partners? You and Cassagnac 1 
Chevasney and I may give ourselves up for lost 1” 

“I am fond of Sabretasche,” said De Yigne, as the Colo- 
nel and De Cassagnac left, about twelve, the former to 


GRANVILLE DE VIONE. 


297 


keep a promise he had made to Yiolet Molyneux to attei^d 
her mother’s soiree that evening — the singular intercourse 
between them, and that strange compact, “not to go be- 
yond friendship,” had only served to draw them nearer to 
friendship’s deadliest foe, and the hours they passed asun- 
der began to grow dangerously wearisome to one, if not 
to both. “ I am fond of Sabretasche. There’s a wonder- 
ful charm about that fellow ; he makes one like him, though 
he would make out that he likes no one. Say what he will, 
there is a nobility and generosity at bottom that one can 
always trust. He does hate trouble ; but I never went to 
him yet to exert himself to help anybody but what he did 
it — did it as I like people to‘do things, not ostentatiously, 
but quietly and liberally. It was he, you know, who helped 
me to get poor old Tressillian’s consulship; and didn’t 
you notice his first impulse, when he thought my young 
artist wanted money, was to give an order, though, with 
his Giorgiones and Claudes, of course he no more wants 
a little water-color than this retriever. People call him a 
raffine voluptuary, a profound egotist, and all the rest of 
it. Bah I I only wish his detractors were one-half as re- 
liable, as generous-hearted, and as delicate in generosity 
as he is. H fait la vie, il s’amuse, as Cassagnac would 
say ; but I know, if I were down in the world and wanted 
help, if I wished for a gift given by the right hand and not 
known by the left, if I needed a man of honor who would 
tell me no lies and betray me no confidence, to which I 
would rather go — to Sabretasche, though he may be a 
mauvais sujet, or ray Lord Savinggrace, though he is a 
model of piety. But then Sabretasche, though he never 
pretends to be moral, does remember to be a man of honor, 
which your very moral and immaculate gentlemen singu- 
larly often forget.” 

“True enough! The Colonel would make himself out 


9-98 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the perfection of egotism, but I have often known him 
thinking and acting for others, with a kindliness and un- 
selfishness very rare in this world. Do you remember the 
trouble he took, when little Buncombe was in that mess 
about his money, to get the boy out of the Jews’ hands 
and have him gently handled? and yet, if there is a thing 
Sabretasche hates, it is business matters of any kind, or 
contact with the under-bred canaille of the world. Like 
you, I am fond of the Colonel, as women say; but I often 
fancy he is not a happy man — don’t you ?” 

“Happy,” repeated De Vigne, with a stir of his fire. 
“No, I don’t suppose he is; few men are. The one-half 
spoil life, the other half are spoiled by life; some are 
strangled by an adverse position, from which they cannot 
escape ; others, born with the fairest prospects, mar them 
by their own self-will, folly, or vice. As for Sabretasche, 
I dare say, if you asked most people, they would tell you 
he is the bien aime of fortune, if ever a man was ; so he 
would seem, leader of ton, wit, critic par excellence as he 
is, with his talent and his taste, his bonnes fortunes and 
his wealth. But I dare say, if we knew all about him, 
there are pages doubled down in his life that he wouldn’t 
care to have reopened, and has done follies in his past 
years that still cling to his present. There are sure to be ; 
no man going is without some dark score or other, often 
written down for him by others’ hands, to which he would 
not willingly refer. Sabretasche is no exception to the 
rule, most likely, and no thoughtful man can live to forty 
without being saddened to a certain degree, if it were only 
by the trickery and artifice he sees going on around him 
in all grades and under all colors, and Sabretasche, indo- 
lent though he may be, sees very keenly through his eye- 
glass.” 

“ Which you won’t allow to light on the little Trossilliau, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


299 


eh ? Why did you let him go off in the idea it was a 
young artist in Poland Street?” 

‘‘Less for Sabretasche himself than all the others,” re- 
sponded De Yigne ; “though, to be sure, with those bonnes 
fortunes of his 1 spoke of just now, and certain stories we 
know of him, little Alma is probably better without his 
acquaintance than with it.” 

“JIallo! if we go by bonnes fortunes and such-like 
reputations, are you a much more eligible friend for her 
than the Colonel ?” 

“Not at all. I have been no saint, God knows; en 
meme temps, I am, thank Heaven, a man of honor, and 
fvith the trust Tressillian, of whom Sabretasche knew 
nothing, placed in me when he wrote that letter, and my 
knowledge of him in my boyhood, to say nothing of her 
own guilelessness and unprotected position, the child would 
be as safe with me as with her brother, even if I had not 
done with love and all its madness.” 

Done with love at thirty-five ! But De Yigne meant what 
he said fully, at the least then : he meant and he believed 
it. He had vowed never to surrender himself to even 'a 
passing taste of that delirium which had already cost him 
so much, and meant to devote his life to the Service, which 
he had loved from the day he entered it, and which could 
alone give him the excitement and the action he coveted. 
Done with love at thirty-five I I looked at him as the fire- 
light shone on his face, with its haughty lines and its pas- 
sionate eyes, and I thought he would one day reap the folly 
of his defiance, as he had already done of his surrender to 
the passion he now renounced. He did not think much 
about the little Tressillian, possibly ; still she was to a de- 
gree a source of interest to him; she appealed to his kind- 
ness ana his generosity, the only two levers by which De 
Yigne, so long won by his eye and his passions and his im- 


300 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


pulses, was now to be moved. Boughton Tressillian had 
been kind to him in his boyhood, it would have been im- 
possible to his nature not to have returned the kindness to 
Boughton Tressillian’s little pet, now that the once heiress 
of W-ftive Hurst was moneyless, forsaken, friendless, and all 
a.one in the world, dependent, poor cliild, upon her own 
exertions for a livelihood, and exposed to all the peines 
fortes et dures of poverty. Alma was calculated to disarm 
him, too. He never thought of her as what she really was, 
a most fascinating woman, but as what she really was too, 
a playful, winning child, familiarly fond of him from grati- 
tude and memory, but gifted with an intelligence so singu- 
larly deep, keen, liberal, and cultured, tjiat absolutely in 
talking to her he forgot her sex, and spoke to her and 
listened to her as he would have done to any man who 
chanced to have a turn of mind and a liberality of opinion 
akin to his own. To the line of Victor Hugo, which I 
already applied to Alma, “Homme par la pensee et femme 
par le coeur,” one might have added, “et enfant par la 
franchise de Pesprit et Pabandon de la gaite.” She was 
lively as one of her own pet kittens ; she had all that elas- 
ticity of spirit, that wildness of gayety, which it is a great 
error to suppose do not very generally accompany intellects 
clearer and hearts deeper than those of the common herd ; 
and lively as she was in her triste and uncongenial life, she 
would have been joyous indeed in a happy one, such as most 
girls at her early age lead. This in itself was the greatest 
attraction to De Vigne ; his own nature was joyous, his 
spirits high, till they were crushed and chilled by his fatal 
marriage; he had that love of fun in him which is latent 
in all sweet and anti-morbid characters ; he liked life and 
spirit in his dogs, his hprses, in everything; he liked them 
especially in women, whom he had always sought in pro- 
portion as they amused him. Alma’s vivacitv amused him 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


301 


and refreshed him ; and where he had been amused, De 
\rigne had always gone, without any thought of possible . 
consequences to himself. 

He went to see her three or four times. Once he stopped 
there en route to lunch at the Star and Garter; once he 
went to go over Strawberry Hill with her, amused with the 
romantic souvenirs she poured into his ear; once or twice 
he went over to see her in the early noon. Whenever he 
had been in town he had been in the habit of spending an 
hour or two occasionally in Richmond Park or Windsor 
Forest in the morning, to have a snatch of the fresh wood- 
land air amidst the hurry and heat of the season ; and seven 
miles was soon covered with his slashing stride, that had 
carried him across the Himalayas and the Pyrenees, up the 
Tyrol, and over the Col du Geant. About a month after 
we had chanced on the little Tressillian, the day looked 
sunny and bright, and when he had done his breakfast and 
his Times, De Yigne, who was fond of walking, took his 
stick, whistled his terriers, and walked across to Richmond 
before any of his set were up, or, at least, visible, thinking 
to himself he would go and see the little Tressillian. At 
the gate he met her, just coming out of the garden. 

“Going for a walk?” asked De Vigne, as Alma wel- 
comed him with that cordial epanchement du coeur natural 
to her with those whom she liked and was pleased to see. 

“Yes, I was; but that is no consequence, and certainly 
no deprivation, this cold day. Do come in and talk to 
me.” 

“No, thank you; I will walk and talk with you, if you 
like. I was going to take a look at the park after I had 
asked you how you were, so we can go together.” 

They did go together. Alma delighted to have him for 
her companion ; and very naturally, too, for there were few 
women in town, however admired and supercilious, who 

20 


VOL. I 


S02 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


would not have liked two hours’ tete-a tete with De Tigne, 
though few would have shown it him so innocently and 
naturally. Alma, though with her Southern blood and her 
Lorave habits she did not admire walking in cold weather, 
enjoyed herself this morning, with the dogs scampering 
before her and De Yigne talking to her, while the wind 
blew a bright rose-color into her cheeks, and her dark- 
blue eyes beamed with the amusement and gladness in- 
herent in her nature. 

“Are you not very dull here, Alma?” he a,sked her, as 
they walked along through the park. 

“Yes. I am not of a sufficiently superior mind to see 
the charms of solitude,” she answered, laughing. “I am 
tired of the life I lead. I admit it fully, though I suppose 
if I were philosophic I should not yearn after the pomps 
and vanities, alias the re6nements and the pleasures, of 
existence. My days are monotonous. I cannot tell one 
from the other. I have no friends, no amusements, no 
society, nor can I obtain them in any way. I cannot 
make a fortune all at once. I cannot run up to some 
grande dame, and say to her, ‘Introduce me into your 
circle; I want to belong to the creme de la creme.’ I 
cannot free myself any more than a goldfinch caught and 
caged can free itself, and go back to its beloved chestnut 
boughs. Yes, Major De Yigne, I am very dull — I admit 
it — except, indeed, when you come to see me.” 

“Poor little thing I” said De Yigne, involuntarily, as he 
pushed some brambles out of her path with his cane. 
“Well, you have read Monte Christo! You must remem- 
ber his last words.” 

“ ‘ Attendre et esperer ’ ?” repeated Alma. “ To me they 
are the saddest words in human language. They are so 
seldom the joy-bells to herald a new future — they are so 
often the death-knell to a past wasted in futile striving and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


303 


disappointed desire. ‘Attendre et esperer !’ How many 
beaux jours pass in trusting to those words; and when 
their trust be at last recompensed, how often the fulfillment 
comes too late to be enjoyed. It always irritates me to 
hear people say it is good for youth to bear privation ; 
they can repose in their old age. Do those moralists never 
stop to remember what it is to have your youth marred by 
adverse circumstances, cramped by straitened means, pass- 
ing away from you? — all your beaux jours, all the spring- 
time of your life, passing away without your being allowed 
to gather one of the flowers growing by its highway, glid- 
ing from your hands unblessed, unenjoyed, without a single 
glimpse of that insouciant gladness which seems its heri- 
tage — gliding, never to return? ‘Attendre et esperer I’ 
Ah I that is all very well for those who have some fixed 
goal in view— some aim which they will attain if they have 
but energy and patience enough to go steadily on to the 
end ; but only to wait for an indefinite better fate, which year 
after year retreats still farther — only to hope against hope 
for what never comes, and in all probability will never 
come — that is not quite so easy.” 

“If it is not, it is the lot of all,” answered De Vigne. 
“However favored by fortune, take my word for it, no 
man’s or woman’s life turns out in any way what they 
dreamt and wished it in their premiere jeunesse. The 
young beauty at eighteen or twenty, entering the world 
with all her ideals hot-pressed from the leaves of Jocelyn 
or Evangeline, dreams of some romantic and love-blessed 
future, and, a season or two afterward, ends in a marriage 
for position. In tender moments afterward, no doubt she 
will now and then recall those by-gone idyls of her girlhood 
with a sigh.” 

“But her fate is of her own carving,” interrupted Alma. 
“She cannot charge life with the result of her own actions 
and ambitions ” 


$04 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“That does not follow. Education, custom, surround- 
ings, the bias of her birth, the incitements of her friends, 
may all have had a good deal to do with it. But I was 
going to say that, though she may sigh — on the eternal 
principle that a bunch of -currants we cannot have seems 
sweeter than a cluster of the finest hot-house grapes a la 
main — for the unfulfilled desires and visions of her youth, it 
is a great doubt whether she would have been a quarter so 
happy if they had been fulfilled. A love-match and a 
limited income would have banished her fancy for romance 
quite as effectually and more painfully than the entourages 
of wealth, prosaic though they may seem to you. But as 
for your attendre et esperer, I agree with you, nothing 
chafes and frets one more than waiting; it wears all the 
bloom off the fruit to waste all our golden hours gazing at 
it afar off, and longing for it with Tantalus thirst. It has 
never suited me. I have too often brushed the bloom off 
mine plucking them too soon; and, as for hope, she may 
figure well in Collins’s ode; but as we go on in life, we 
know there is nothing more delusive than the flutter of her 
shadowy wings, which lead us on as the Willis of the Ger- 
man legends lure men, with their silvery hair and sylphide 
forms, to dance on the very border of their tombs. I agree 
with you, to wait for happiness is a living death, to hope 
for it is a dreamer’s phantasy ; but it is not like your usual 
doctrine, you little enthusiast, who are still such a child 
that you believe in the possible realization of all your 
fond ideals. What were you sayiug to me the other day 
at Strawberry Hill about Chatterton, that if the poor boy 
had only had the courage to wait and hope, he might have 
reaped long years of honor and of fame ?” 

“But Chatterton had an aim; and he had more : he had 
the godlike gift of genius, which gives to the hearts of all 
signaled by its touch a beauty and a glory that no wrong, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


305 


ao trial, no suffering can ever take away I know he was 
goaded to madness by poverty. I know how bitter to that 
boy, with his fervid imaginings, his poet’s longings, his 
beautiful day-dreams, must have been the weary fret of 
thinking what he should eat, and wherewithal he should be 
clothed, the jar and grind of every-day wants, of petty yet 
inexorable cares, so wearing even to most common and 
the most narrowed minds. I can well believe how they 
wore into his soul and bowed his young head down to the 
grave, as the only home that would open for him to rest 
from the cruel wear and jar of the world, that seemed so 
cold to him. At the same time, I wonder that he did not 
live for his works ; that for their sake he did not suffer and 
endure; that the strong genius in him did not give him 
power and courage to struggle against all that strove to 
crush it; that he did not live to make the v/orld acknowl- 
edge all that marked him out from the common herd. I 
know how he wearied of life; yet I wish he had conquered 
it. It always makes me sad to think that genius should be 
trampled down by the injustice and the petty cruelties of 
the world. Genius should ever be stronger than its de- 
tractors. ‘What is the use of my writing poetry that no 
one reads?’ asked Shelley. Yet he knew that the time 
would come when it would be read by men wiser than those 
of his generation, and he wrote on, following the in- 
spiration of his own divine gift. Men know and acknowl- 
edge now how divine a gift it was.” 

“True,” answered De Yigne; “wrestle with fate, and it 
will bless you, is a wise and a right counsel; still here and 
there in that wrestling-match it is possible to get a croc en 
iambe, which leaves us at the mercy of Fate, do what we 
may to resist her. Men of genius have very rarely been 
appreciated in their own time. Too often nations spend 
wealth upon a monument to him whom they let die for 

20 * u 


806 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


want of a shilling. Too many, like Cervantes, have lacked 
bread while they penned what served to make their country 
honored and illustrious. They could write of him : 

Porque se digua qua uno mano herida 

Pudo dar a su dueno eterna vida; 

but they could leave him to poverty for all that. Johnson 
must dine behind the screen, while Beau Nash reigns King 
of the Wells. It must ever be so, as long as the world is 
divided as it is into twenty who like ombre and basset, 
small-talk and shoe-buckles, to only one here and there 
who cares for satire and wisdom. A prophet has no honor 
in his own country, still less in his own time ; but if the 
prophets be true and wise men, they will not look for 
honor, but follow Philip Sydney’s counsel, look in their 
own hearts and write, and leave the seed of their brain as 
plowmen the corn in the furrows — content that it will 
bring forth a harvest at the last, if it be ripe, good wheat.” 

“Yet it is sad if they are forced to see only the dark 
and barren earth, and the golden harvest only rise to wave 
over their tomb I” 

“It is; but, petite, there are few things not sad in life, 
and one of the saddest of them is, as Emerson says, ‘the 
madness with which the passing age mischooses the object 
on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned,’ regis- 
tering every trifle touching Elizabeth, and Leicester, and 
Essex, and passing over, without a note, ‘the popular 
player, in whom none foresees the poet of the human race/ 
The populace who crowded to look at Charles and Louise 
de Kerroualle coming to Hampton never knew or thought 
of Cromwell’s Latin secretary, dictating in his study, old, 
blind, and poor. Well, it only shows us what fools men 
are, either to court the world or care for it I Apropos of 
celebres, Alma, you, vouee as you are to historic associa- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


307 


tions, should never be dull here, with all the souvenirs that 
are round Richmond and Twickenham.’’ 

“Ah !” said Alma, turning her bright beaming face on 
him, “how often I think of them all I — of the talk round 
that little deal table in the grotto, spiced with the same 
wit that gave its sting to the Dunciad and its sparkle to 
the Essay ; of Swift, with his brilliant azure eyes, and his 
wonderful satire, and his exigeant selfish man-like loves; 
of Mrs. Clive, with her humorous stories; and Harry Field- 
ing, laughing as he wrote the scenes men still cite as mas- 
ter-pieces, and packing away his papers to eat his scrag of 
mutton as gleefully as if it were an entremet ; and Walpole, 
with his medieval tastes and modern fashions, fitting up a 
Gothic chapel and writing for a Paris suit, publishing 
‘Otranto,’ and talking scandales in Boodle’s — how often I 
think of them !” 

“You need not tell me that,” laughed De Yigne. “ I have 
not forgotten all your romantic souvenirs at the mere view 
of the sites of Strawberry Hill and Pope’s villa. With your 
historic passion, you live in the past. Well ! it is safer and 
less deceptive, if not less visionary, than living in the future.” 

“Perhaps I do both; yet I have little to hope from the 
future.” 

“Why?” said De Yigne, kindly. “Who knows but 
what one of your old favorites, the fairies, may bring good 
gifts to their little queen? We will hope so, at least.” 

Alma shook her head. “ I am afraid not. The only 
fairy that has any power now is Money, and the good gifts 
the gods give us now-a-days only go to those who have 
golden coffers to put them in. Yes, I do live in the past; 
my future I cannot trust. I very seldom look at it, save 
in wild delicious fancies, which, I fear, will never come 
true ; but the past — I love to go back to it, with its quaint 
Vandyke portraits, and its rich Yelasquez coloring, and its 


308 


GRANVILLE DE VIONE. 


chiar’oscuro of time, which gives it a dim golden liaze that 
was probably never its own. I think the company of 
Commines and Froissart, Saint-Simon, and Hervey, and 
Walpole, better, after all, than many of the circles of 
modern society. I like to go back into the past through 
the quaint word-painting of an old chronicle, or the deep 
rich hues of a Murillo or a Velasquez. I love those dim 
yet brilliant pictures of by-gone days that poetry and his- 
tory weave together. They are all living to me — those 
grave and stately signori who condemned Faliero ; those 
silent resolute Netherlanders who gathered in the market- 
place to see Lamoral d’Egmont die with his Golden Fleece 
around his neck, the gift of his tiger-king ; those gay and 
glittering crowds of haughty noblesse that filled the palaces 
of the Bourbons, and laughed at the malicious wit of 
Athenais de Montespan, with her ‘dove’s eye and serpent’s 
tongue;’ those dandies and beauties who dressed for Rane- 
lagh and clapped the ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ and followed the 
lead of Beaux Edgeworth and Nash, Fielding and Brum- 
mel, copying the tie of their cravats one hour, and letting 
them languish in prison the next; those wits and celebri- 
ties whose mots still sparkle through the dry pages of 
memoirs, and gleam through the yellow faded leaves of 
their letters, — they are all living to me, Sir Folko 1 as living 
as if I heard the rustle of their silks, and the ring of their 
jeux de mots, and the glitter of their stars and orders I” 

He laughed. It amused him unspeakably to hear her 
talk. If she had chosen to go on for an hour, I don’t 
believe he would ever have stopped her. 

“ I often think,” Alma went on, “what pride and gratifi- 
cation it must be to any man — to you, for instance — to 
look back on a long line of noble ancestry. It must give 
you a glow of a warmer feeling than pride; it must bring 
you a heritage of honor that none can take away; it must 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


309 


make you love to live so as never to disgrace them, no»* 
stain the name they have handed down to you 

Her unconscious words struck with a keen sting into De 
Yigne’s heart. He loved his gentleman's name, honored 
as it had been in by-gone generations by the talent, courage, 
and gallantry of his father’s fathers. He was proud of his 
ancestry, as all men must be who have anything in them 
of a love for what is noble and worthy. He, in his boy« 
hood, had vowed “to live so as never to disgrace them;” 
yet he had been the first of his line that had given it to 
one who dishonored it; he had been the first who had 
placed it in hands that degraded it I Alma’s innocent 
words struck the chord of that bitter regret which was 
ever upon him — the stain of his marriage upon that name 
which had never before been borne save by women noble of. 
birth and pure in life. He answered her with an effort. 
Unfulfilled aspirations, unkept resolves, unavailing regrets, 
rose up in him at her words. 

“ It ought — it does not follow that it must What should 
be, rarely is, petite. Still I think with you : it were odd 
if the man who inherited intellect cultivated, manners re- 
fined, and honor held high through many generations, had 
not something better born in him with his pur sang than the 
man whose fathers were blackguards, thieves — God knows 
what — whose hands were dirty, and brains untutored, and 
names unknown and unvalued. But just now men of rank 
and breeding are selected only as the stalking-horse on 
which to exhibit in terrorem all the vices of the Deca- 
logue and the law courts. In all the romances of the day 
— pandering to public taste, and written very often by 
people not within the pale of good society, ignorant of its 
ways and envious of its distinctions — the hero is invariably 
self-educated — other education is thought, I suppose, de 
luxe ; and you are carefully assured that he never either 


310 


GRANVILLE DE V^IGNE. 


could, or would, or wished to be, attractive and well-bred, 
those being sybaritisms, and quite anterior to the rough 
‘muscular Christianity’ of which he is certain to be an 
apostle. To write a book of what will be called a ‘ healthy’ 
and ‘moral’ tone — a book that will ‘go down’ in religious 
circles, and be ‘asked for’ at circulating libraries — you 
must now be careful to select some brawny-armed carpen- 
ter, or hard-working ‘self-made man’ — you must throw in, 
into counter-position to him, a man of rank, blackguardly 
as the details of Bow Street police-court — you must balance 
in exact ratio the morality and purity of your under-bred 
man with the rascality and impossible villainy of your well- 
born enfant terrible — you must incline your heroine to the 
Satanic beauty of your Lothario, but make her see her 
error, and take refuge in the arras of your Hercules. Such 
a plot, with a few stale apothegms, a night class, where 
your hero teaches the Gospel, or some moral philosophies, 
with a retributive end to your supposititious ‘gentleman,’ 
and a good scene at the finish of your ungainly but im- 
maculate pet, with one eye burnt out in the conflagration 
of his mill or his workshop, and an open Bible laid out on 
his knee, your novel will be healthy, and, what healthy 
writers count on most, remunerative. Doubtless there are 
very estimable coal- merchants, most irreproachable carpen- 
ters; I am sure there are, though they don’t happen to be 
in my set, and come across my path. No doubt a man 
who rises like Robert Peel, or Edward Sugden, or Douglas 
Jerrold, is a noble example in our generation, as Baptiste 
Colbert was in his; we can wish for none better, we can 
cite none more encouraging to young men of talent supe- 
rior to their fortunes, and energy struggling against adverse 
circumstances. But, because a man has risen from the 
ranks, it is very far from following that he must necessarily 
have risen by right means or worthy steps. Very often it 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB. 


311 


is quite the contrary; it is very generally by chicanery 
and fraud, by doing very dirty jobs, by kicking down each 
round of the ladder by which they have profited, by squeez- 
ing every farthing out of widows and orphans, by unseen 
swindling and robbery under the rose : because a man is a 
‘self-made man,’ it does not follow that the tools he has 
used are those for which we should laud him.” 

“No,” answered Alma; “it is a curious fancy of the 
present day, that the mud of the gutter must purify, and 
the blue blood of the stately escutcheons must stain ; and 
it is as curious a paradox that the very authors who, in 
writing of some historic site, dwell with such ecstasies on 
the nobility and heroism of those who made it famous, try 
to sneer down, with a savage cut at aristocracy, the de- 
scendants of the men they eulogize. If great deeds give 
such an aroma to woods and hills, mortar and stone, surely 
they may give some to the inheritors of their blood and 
their name. It is singular, as you say, to see the universal 
type adopted in all novels of the present day. Your class 
is never represented, or at least never fairly.” 

De Vigne laughed: 

“No; the romancists only take our class to vilify it, and 
lead it out as a bete noire or a scarecrow. The soldier or 
the man of rank is scarcely ever represented as he is in any 
novel of the day ; yet we are a large class — perhaps the best 
educated in the land — certainly one that has the most in- 
fluence in many things ; but military men are invariably 
made such under-bred fools as would be inadmissible iu 
the society to which they belong, and of a ‘gentleman’ — 
i.e. a man of honor, birth, and high breeding, such as, 
though they may not be demigods or saints, one meets 
many, thank God I both in literary and patrician circles — 
the young men and maidens who rush into print would 
seem to have not the faintest notion, since if their char- 


312 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


acters be meant to be of tolerable birth and manners, they 
load them with the vulgar tricks they see now and then 
detailed in the newspaper reports of some drunken ensign 
with his school-boy mischief still about him. There is a 
strange spite — for it really merits no higher term — against 
the aristocracy — not a just and sensible exposition, that 
brain, wherever it be found, whether under Chatham’s 
coronet, or Burns’s peasant bonnet, is equally worthy, and 
Watt studying steam by his aunt’s cottage tea-kettle is as 
great in his way as Wellington planning the lines of Torres 
Yedras in his — but a smarting, envious, venomous spite, 
which decrees that good names in his past must make a 
man utterly unable to make great names for himself. We 
see the contrary around us every day ; we have great states- 
men, soldiers, men of letters, who give the lie to it. It is 
to men of birth and cultivation that the country is glad to 
come for its prime ministers and its cabinet counselors; yet 
the opticism holds its reign ; and if a peer’s son, once in a 
w'ay, plays one of those harum-scarum, vulgar, practical 
jokes such as are not unknown, though unrecorded, among 
the young Browns, and Joneses, and Robinsons of the im« 
maculate ‘ middle class,’ pounce come all the little stinging 
flies and seize upon the offense, and hold it up to the eyes 
of the nation with angry snarl and coarse anathema against 
his Order, with as much wisdom and justice in their sweep- 
ing invective as those would show who called a merchant a 
bankrupt because his boy owed five shillings to a school- 
fellow he could not pay until next half. I take it, if one 
looked thoroughly into it, that the dissipations of the upper 
classes, on which these gentry, who find it ‘the thing,’ to 
prate of ‘pure lives’ and ‘spotless morals,’ hold forth so 
severely of late, be, after all, worse in their way and in 
their fruits than the giant frauds, the suo rosd robberies, 
the mercantile lies, the banking swindles, the professional 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


313 


hypocrisies, the dishonest Jesuitisms, perpetrated in the 
middle classes under the name of — Business. But I shall 
talk myself hoarse, and you deaf, Alma. One o’clock. 
We have absolutely been walking two hours. We must 
turn back, or I shall have you knocked up. You are not 
used to our cold March mornings.” 

“But I enjoy it so intensely,” interrupted Alma, lifting 
her radiant face to his. “Won’t you come in and have 
some luncheon? You dined often enough at Weive 
Hurst,” she asked, as he held out his hand to her at the 
gate. 

Luncheon is not disagreeable after three hours’ walking. 
He went and took some of Mrs. Lee’s admirably done cut- 
lets, just served for Alma’s little dinner, and he stayed till 
the afternoon sun was getting red in the west. Alma 
walked with him down the garden, and as he looked back 
and waved her an adieu, De Yigne could not help but 
confess that she made a pretty tableau leaning over the 
white gate with little Sylvo in her arms. 

He smiled as he walked along, cutting the brown grass 
with his cane. “She is a clever little thing,” he thought 
to himself; “it is wonderfully amusing to talk to her. Poor 
child ! it is a dull life for her there. Well I she is out of 
harm’s way; in the world she would soon come to grief.” 

De Yigne was destined to remember, too late, tliat 
“L’Amitie est I’Amour sans ailes,” and that the pinions 
may be sprouted and spread ere we even know of their 
growth. 




t 


VOL. 


S14 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


PART THE ELEVENTH 

I. 

HOW DE VIGNE AMUSES HIMSELF WITH FENCING, AND 
NEVER DREAMS THE BUTTONS CAN FLY OFF. 

De Vigne never did anything by halves, to use a suffi- 
ciently expressive, if not over-elegant, colloquialism. He 
hated and mistrusted women, not individually, as he ought 
to have done, but sweepingly, en masse. At the same 
time, there was in him, naturally, too much chivalry and 
generosity not to make him pity “Little Tressillian,” and 
show her kindness to the best of his power. In the first 
place, the girl was all alone, and had no money — two facts 
which appealed to his delicacy and warmer feeling; in the 
second, he had known her as a little girl, still held her as 
such, indeed, and never thought of classing her among his 
detested “beau sexe;” in the thifd, the letter of Boughton 
Tressillian had in a way recommended her to his care, and, 
though De Vigne would have been the first to laugh at 
another man who, at thirty-five, had taken up a girl of 
eighteen as a protegee, and made sure no harm could come 
of it, he really looked on Alma as a child, though a very 
attractive and interesting child it is true, and would have 
stared at you if you had made his kindness to her the sub- 
ject of one of those jests customary on the acquaintance 
of a man about town and an unprotected girl — like himself 
and “ Little Tressillian.” He was kind to her, for there 
was a deep spring of generosity and (where he liked 
people) of lavish kindness under the cynicism and chill 
reserve now gathered round him. As he had promised, be 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


315 


picked out some of the choicest books of his library, his 
own favorites — not such as young ladies read generally, but 
such as it might be better if they did — and sent them to 
her, with the reviews and periodicals of the month. He 
sent her, too, one of his parrots, for her to teach, he said, 
she being such an admirable adept in the locutory art, and 
some flowers, to put her in mind of Weive Hurst. 

“ Her room looked so pitifully dull, poor child I’’ said he, 
one morning, when I was lunching with him. “ Those 
flowers will brighten it up a little, and she’ll care for them 
more than I. Ilaymond, did you send Robert down with 
those things to Richmond ?” 

“Yes, Major.” 

I chanced to look at the man as he spoke ; he was the 
new valet, whom De Vigne thought such an acquisition. 
He was a smooth, fair-faced fellow, really gentlemanlike to 
look at, not, 9a va sans dire, the “gentlemanism ” of high 
breeding, but the gentlemanlyism of many an oily parson 
or sleek parvenu. There was a slight twinkle in his light 
eyes, and a quick, fox-like glance as he answered his 
master, which looked as if he at least attached some amuse- 
ment to the Major’s acquaintance with the pretty little 
artiste at St. Crucis-on-the-Hill. 

De Yigne never remembered the presence of servants; 
he thought they had no more eyes or ears than the chairs 
or tables around him. They served him as the plates or 
the glasses did, and they were no more than those to him ; 
else, wise man as he was, he ought to have recollected that, 
if he wished to draw no notice upon Alma, he should not 
have sent his servants to her with books and flowers. More 
mischief, reports, and embrouillements have come from the 
prying eyes, coarse tongues, and second-hand slanders of 
those “necessary evils” than we ever dream of, for the buzz 
of the servants’ hall is often as poisonous as the subdued 


SI6 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


murmur of the scandal-retailing boudoir above stairs. 
How it came about, I don’t know, but Alma, some way or 
other, was not long in petto . Some three weeks after 
that, Sabretasche, Curly, Tom Severn, Yane Castleton, and 
one or two other men were at De Yigne’s house. We had 
been playing Loo, his favorite game, and were now supping, 
between three and four, off all the delicacies and first-class 
wines his chef and cellar could offer us, chatting of two- 
year-olds and Derby books, of bons mots and beauties, of 
how Mademoiselle Fifine had fleeced Little Pulteney, and 
Bob Green’s roan mare won a handicap for 200 sovs. — the 
talk that is chatted over a late supper-table and choice 
champagne cup, in real life; though, no doubt, real life is 
shockingly frivolous, and all wrong altogether, and we 
ought — though you know we never do — out of “healthy 
novels” of “ muscular Christianity” (by the way, what may 
that mean ?) to have been puzzling out our several missions, 
discussing how to Christianize India, analyzing the Origin 
of Species, or blackening everybody else’s character and 
whitening our own, which is, I believe, the received recipe 
for “regenerating” society. 

It was curious to see the difference between men’s outer 
and inner lives. There was Sabretasche lying back in the 
very easiest chair in the room, witty, charming, urbane, 
with not a trace on his calm, delicate features of the care 
within him that he had bade Yiolet Molyneux not tempt 
him to unveil; there was Tom Severn, of the Queen’s 
Bays, with twenty “in re’s” hanging over his head, and a 
hundred “little bills” on his mind, going to the dogs by 
express train, who had been playing away as if he had had 
Barclay’s to back him; there was Wyndham, with as dark 
and melancholy a past as ever pursued a man, a past of 
which I know he repented, not in ostentatious sackcloth 
and ashes, but bitterly and unfeignedly in silence and hu- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


317 


mility, tossing down Moet’s with a gay laugh and a ready 
jest, as agreeable in the card-room as he was eloquent in 
the Lower House; there was Charlie Fitzhardinge, who, 
ten years ago, had accidentally killed his youngest brother, 
a Benjamin tenderly and deeply loved by him, and had 
never ceased to be haunted by that fair distorted face, 
laughing and chatting as if he had never had a care on his 
shoulders; there was Yane Castleton, the worst, as I have 
told you, of all Tiara’s sons, a fellow without heart, honor, or 
conscience, fatal to women and disliked by men — with his 
low voice, his fair, smooth brow, his engaging address, 
nobody would have thought he would have hurt a fly, yet 
we called him butcher, because, in his petty malignity, he 
had hamstrung a luckless mare of his for not winning a 
Sweepstakes he had intended her, and had shot dead the 
young brother of a girl, the daughter of a clergyman, 
(wligm he had eloped with, and left three weeks after with- 
out a shilling to help herself,) for trying, poor boy ! to 
revenge the faithless cruelty to his sister; there was De 
Yigne — yet, no, De Yigne’s face was type true enough of 
his character — a character reserved, by nature very frank 
and haughty, generous as the winds, but impetuous, pas- 
sionate, and proud ; in the sleeping fire of his eyes and the 
iron command of his brow, with the strong, straight arch 
of its eyebrows, was the visible stamp of an unquiet fate. 

“Halloa, De Yigne,” began Tom Severn, at supper, “a 
pretty story this is about you, you sly dog I So this painter 
of yours we were all called in to admire a little time ago 
is a little concealed Yenus, eh?” 

De Yigne looked up from helping me to some mayon- 
naise. 

“Explain yourself, Tom; I don’t understand you.” 

Won’t understand, you mean. You know you’ve a little 
beauty locked up all to yourself in a farm-house at Rich- 

27 * 


318 


GRANVILLE BE VIGNE. 


mond, and never have told it to your bosom friends 
Shockingly shabby of you, De Yigne, to show us that 
water-color and let us believe it was done by^ young 
fellow in Poland Street. However, I suppose you don’t 
want any rivals poaching on your manor, and the girl is a 
ravir, we’re told, so we must forgive you, eh?” 

De Yigne looked supremely disdainful and a little 
annoyed. 

“Pray, my dear Severn, may I ask where you picked 
up this cock-and-bull story ?” 

“Oh yes. Winters, and Egerton, and Steele were 
making chaff about it in the Army and Navy this morn- 
ing, saying Hercules had found his Omphale, and they 
were glad of it, for Dejanira was a devil !” 

The blood flushed over De Yigne’s white forehead as 
Severn, in the thoughtlessness of his heart, spoke what he 
meant as good nature; even yet he could not hear un- 
moved the slightest allusion to the Trefusis, the one dis- 
grace upon his life, the one stain upon his name. 

“How iAe?/ heard it I can’t tell you,” said Severn; “you 
must ask ’em. Somebody saw the girl looking after you 
at the gate,'I believe. She’s a deuced pretty little thing, 
ain’t she ? — trust you for that, though — with golden hair, 
I think. 1 like golden hair myself, it’s so out of the com- 
mon, and makes a woman look like a walking sunbeam. 
But what do you call it a cock-and-bull story for? It’s 
too likely a one for you to deny it with any chance of our 
believing you, and Heaven knows why you should try. 
You may hate women now, but everybody knows you 
never forswore them. We are all shepherds here, aa 
Robin Hood says.” 

De Yigne was annoyed: in the first place, that this 
report, which could but be detrimental to her, should, in 
BO brief a time, already have circulated about himself and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


319 


poor little xllma; in the second, any interference with him 
or his pursuits or plans always irritated him exceedingly ; 
in the third, he knew that if he ever disabused their minds 
of his having any connection with Alma, to know that a 
pretty little thing was living alone and unprotected was 
for these fellows to ferret her out immediately, to which 
hei metier of professional artiste would give them the 
means at once. He was exceedingly annoyed, but he was 
too wise a man not to know that manifestation of his an- 
noyance w’^ould be the surest way to confirm the gossip that 
had got about concerning them, which for himself, of course, 
didn’t matter two straws. 

He laughed slightly. “We are, it is true, Tom; never- 
theless, there is a fawn here and there that it is the duty 
of all of us to spare; don’t you know that? I assure 
you — and I have no need to ask any of you to believe 
my word — that the gossip you have heard is pure gossip, 
but gossip which annoys me, for this reason, that the lady 
who is the innocent subject of it is the granddaughter of a 
very old friend of mine, Tressillian, of Wiltshire, whom I 
met accidentally a few weeks ago. Her picture hangs in 
my room here, but merely because she wished to have Sa- 
bretasche’s judgment upon it, of whom I had spoken to 
her as a dilettante and first-rate artist. Beyond, I have 
no interest in her, nor she in me, and for the sake of my 
dead friend, any insult to her name I shall certainly con- 
sider as though one to my own, for I respect Miss Tressil- 
lian as fully as if she were now in the rank and affluence 
her childhood was passed in, and I shall listen to mess- 
table gossip about her as little as I should listen to it 
about any sister of mine, if I had one.” 

He spoke quietly and carelessly, but his words had 
weight. De Yigne had never been known to condescend 
to a lie, not even to a subterfuge or a prevarication, and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


i JO 

( icrc was such a haughty noli me tangey'e air about him, 
t-iat nobody thought of meddling with his concerns. 

“All right, old fellow,” said good-natured Tom Severn. 
“/ didn’t know, you see; fellows will talk.” 

“Of course they will,” said De Vigne, eating his mari- 
nade leisurely; “and in nine times out of ten they would 
have been right. I never set up to be a pharisee, God 
knows. I’m a great deal too naughty a boy for that. 
However, I have no temptation now, for love affairs are 
no longer to my taste — I leave them to Corydons like 
Curly. As poetic individuals say, I have but one love, 
my sword, and if I can’t have her, I am so constant I care 
for no other.” 

“But, hang it! De Vigne,” said Vane Castleton, “ Tom’s 
description of this little Trevelyan, Trevanion — what is it ? 
— is so delightful, if you don’t care for her yourself, you 
might let your friends. Introduce us all, do.” 

“ Thank you, Castleton,” said De Vigne, dryly. “ Though 
you are a Duke’s son, I must say I don’t think you a very 
desirable addition to a lady’s acquaintance.” 

He cordially detested Castleton, than whom a vainer or 
more intensely selfish fellow never curled his whiskers and 
befooled women silly enough to be caught by his specious 
manners and purring voice, and he had only invited him 
because he had been arm-in-arm with Severn when De 
Vigne asked Tom that 'morning in Regent Street. 

Lord Vane pushed his fine fair curls olf his forehead — 
an habitual trick of his; his brow was very low, and his 
blond hair, of which he took immense care, was everlast- 
ingly falling across his eyes. “Jealous, after all ! A trifie 
of the dog in the manger, eh? with all your philosophy 
and a — a — what do you call it, chivalry ?” he said, with a 
supercilious smile. 

I knew De Vigne was growing impatient; his eyes 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


321 


brightened, his mouth grew set, and he pulled bis left 
wristband over his wrist with a jerk. I think that left 
arm felt an intense longing in its muscles and sinews to 
^‘straighten from the shoulder;” with him, as with David, 
it was a great difficulty to keep the fire from “kindling.” 
But he spoke quietly, very quietly for him ; more so than 
he would have done if no other name than his own had 
been implicated in it ; for he knew the world too well not 
to know, also, that to make a woman the subject of 
a dispute or a brawl is to do her the worst service you 
can. 

“ I am not a boy to interpret insult where no insult is 
dreamt of, so I shall not take your speech as it might be 
taken, Castleton,” he said, gravely, with a scornful, haughty 
smile upon his lips. “My friends accept my word and 
understand my meaning; what you may think of me or 
not is really of so little consequence that I do not care to 
inquire your opinion.” 

Castleton’s eyes scintillated with that cold unpleasant 
glare with which light-gray eyes sometimes kindle when 
angry. If he had been an Eton or Rugby boy, one would 
have called him “sulky;” for a man of rank and fashion 
the word would have been too small. A scene might have 
ensued, but Sabretasche — most inimitable tactician — broke 
the silence with his soft low voice : 

“De Yigne, do you know that Harvey Goodwin’s steel 
grays are going for an old song in the Yard? I fancy I 
shall buy them. Don’t you think they would go well with 
the pair I bought the other day for my drag ?” 

So the conversation was turned, and little Alma Tres- 
gillian’s name was dropped. Curly, however, half out of 
raechancetc, half because he never heard of a pretty woman 
without making a point of seeing her, never let De Yigne 
alone till he had promised to introduce him to her. 


$22 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Do, old fellow,” urged Curly, “because you know [ 
remember her at Weive Hurst, and she had such deuced 
lovely eyes then. Do I I promise you to treat her as if 
she were the richest heiress in the kingdom, and hedged 
round with a perfect abatis of chaperones. I can’t say 
more I” 

So De "Vigne took him down, being quite sure that if he 
did not show him the way Curly would find it for himself, 
and knowing, too, that Curly, though he was a dandy, a 
“little wild,” as good-natured ladies say, indolent, spoilt, 
and devil-may-care, was a true gentleman ; and when a 
man is that, you may trust him, where his honor is touched 
or his generosity concerned, to break through his outer 
shell of fashion, ennui, and dissipation, and “come out 
strong” in his original inborn nature. 

So De Yigne, as I say, took him down one morning, 
when we had nothing to do, to the little farm-house of St. 
Crucis. It was a queer idea, as conventionalities go, for 
a young girl to receive the visits of men like ourselves 
without any chaperone to protect her and play propriety; 
but the little lady was one out of a thousand ; she could 
do things that no other woman could, and she welcomed 
us with such a mixture of frank and childlike simplicity, 
and the self-possession, ready wit, and perfect ease of a 
woman ten years her senior, and accustomed to society, 
that it was very pretty to see her. And we should have 
known but a very trifle of life and womanhood if we had 
not felt how utterly distant from boldness or forwardness 
of any kind was our Little Tressillian’s charming vivacity 
and ingenuous candor — a vivacity that can only come from 
an intelligent mind, a candor that can only spring from a 
heart that thinks no ill because it means none. “To the 
pure all things are pure.” True words ! Many a spotless 
rain- drop gleams unsoiled on a filthy and betrodden trot- 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


323 


toir; many a worm grovels in native mud beneath an un- 
spotted and virgin covering of fairest snow. 

It was really pretty to see Alma entertain her callers — 
three bien-aimes of fashionable sets, moreover, and fas- 
tidious to the last degree. She was perfectly natural, 
because she never thought about herself. She was de- 
lighted to see De Yigne, and happy to see us, as he had 
brought us — not quite as flattering a reason for our welcome 
as Curly and I were accustomed to receive; and in her 
dainty picturesque dress, (she still retained the taste for 
pretty toilettes, given her by Boughton Tressillian in her 
childhood,) sitting in her little low chair, Alma chatted 
with us all as easily and fluently as, but with much more 
simplicity and talent than, any Belgravian belle. 

“Have you walked every day, Alma, as I told you?” 
said De Yigne. 

“Not every day,” said Alma, penitentially. “I will 
when the summer comes; but the eternal spring upon my 
canvas is much dearer and more tempting to me than your 
chill and changeable English spring.” 

“You are very naughty, then,” said De Yigne; “you 
will be sorry ten years hence for having wasted your health. 
What is your aim in working and working eternally like 
this ?” 

“ To make money to buy my shoes, and my gloves, and 
my dresses. I have nobody to buy them for me, you 
know ; that is aim practical enough to please you, is it not ?” 

“But that is not your only one, I fancy?” smiled Curly. 
“Miss Tressillian scarcely looks like the expounder of 
prosaic doctrine.” 

“No; not my only one,” answered Alma, quickly, her 
dark-blue eyes lighting up under their silky and upcurled 
lashes. “They say there is no love nK)re tender than the 
love of an artist for his work, whether he is author, painter, 


324 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


or musician ; and I believe it. For the fruit of your talent 
you bear a love that no one, save those who feel it, can 
ever attempt to understand. You long to strengthen your 
wings, to exert your strength, to cultivate your powers, 
till you can make them such as must command applause; 
and when I see a master-piece, of whatever genre, I worship 
with my whole heart the divinity of genius, and feel as if 
I should never rest till I, too, had laid some worthy offer- 
ing upon the altar of art.” 

Ideal and enthusiastic as the words may sgem, coldly 
considered, as little Alma spoke them, with her eloquent 
voice and gesticulation, and her whole face beaming with 
the earnestness of her own belief in what she said, we 
three men, quickest of all mortals to sneer at “sentiment,” 
felt no inclination to ridicule here, but rather a sad regret 
for the cold winds that w^e knew would so soon break and 
scatter the warm petals of this bright, joyous. Southern 
flower, and gave a wistful backward glance to the time 
when we, too, had like thoughts — we, too, like fervor. 

De Yigne felt it more, I believe, than either of us, but, 
as his wont was, he turned it with a laugh : 

“ Curly, you need not have started that young lady. In 
that fertile brain I ought to have warned you there is a 
powder-magazine of enthusiasm ready to explode at the 
mere hint of a firebrand, which one ought not to approach 
within a mile at the least. It will blow itself up some day 
in its own excessive energy, and get quenched in the world^s 
cold water !” 

“Heaven forefend !” cried Curly. “The enthusiasm, 
which you so irreverently compare to gunpowder, is too 
rare and too precious not to be taken ail the care of that 
one can. If the ladies of the world had a little of such 
fire, we, their sons,*or lovers, or brothers, might be a trifle 
less useless, vapid, and wearied.” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


325 


“Quenched in the world’s cold water 1” cried Alma, who 
Had been pondering on De Yigne’s speech, and had never 
heard poor Curly’s. “ It never shall be, Sir Folko. The 
fire of true enthusiasm is like the fires of Baku, which no 
water can ever attempt to quench, and which burn steadily 
on from night to day, and year to year, because their well- 
spring is eternal.” 

“Or because the gases are poisonous, and nobody cares 
to approach them ?” asked De Yigne, mischievously. 

I noticed that Alma was the first who had brought back 
in any degree the love of merriment and repartee natural' 
to him in his youth; the first with whom, since his fatal 
marriage-day, he had ever cordially laughed. She called 
him Sir Folko, because she persisted in the resemblance 
between him and her favorite knight which she had dis- 
covered in her childhood, and because, as she told him, 
“ Major De Yigne” was so ceremonious. His manner with 
her, like that of an elder brother to a pretty spoilt child, 
had established a curiously familiar friendship between 
them, strangely different from the usual intercourse of men 
and young girls ; for De Yigne received from her the com- 
pliments and frankly-expressed admiration that come ordi- 
narily from the man to the woman. Somehow or other it 
seemed perfectly natural between them, and, aprfes tout. 
Eve’s 

My author and disposer! — what thou wilt 
Unargued I obey. God is thy law, 

Thou mine 

is strangely touching, sweet, and natural — strangely like, 
surely, the love that nature meant women to bear to men, 
and strangely ttnlike the “ penchant” of the present day, 
when we kneel at the lady’s feet to sue for that condescend- 
ing assurance of an “interest,” unacknowledged and unseen 
till our “intentions” are fully known, and even then meas- 

28 


VOL. I. 


S26 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ured out but gingerly and meagerly, as is maidenly and 
proper I 

Alma shook her head (on which the much-praised 
“golden hair” of Tom Severn waved and clustered in 
shining undulating bandeaux) impatiently at De Yigne : 

“ Who can beat you at repartee ? If the gas is poisoned, 
monsieur, you have some of it. You have a good deal of 
enthusiasm, only it has had a marble stone rolled over it, 
somehow or other, and will not acknowledge it is still alive 
and awake under it.” 

“ The deuce ! — how quick-sighted this little thing is I” 
thought De Vigne, as he answered : 

“ I enthusiastic ! Good Heavens I what an idea I I have 
done with all that long ago, thank God. I am the most 
practical and commonplace man ” 

“You commonplace I” cried Alma, with horror unspeak- 
able, and bursting indignation. “ Well, if you are common- 
place, so am I, and that is a thing I never did think I” 

“ No, but perhaps you have rather more vanity than I ?” 
said De Vigne, looking at her with an amused smile. 
Alma, for once, had no answer, she was so occupied in 
laughing at her own defeat. 

Curly was enchanted with her ; he went into tenfold 
more raptures about her than the beauties of the Drawing- 
room, with their perfect tournures and sweeping trains, 
had ever extorted from him ; she was “just his style 
a thing, however, that Curly was perpetually avowing of 
every dilferent style of blonde and brunette, tall or small, 
statuesque or kittenish, as they chanced to chase one 
another in and out of his capacious heart. 

She is a little darling I” he swore, earnestly, as wo 
drove homeward, “and certainly the very prettiest woman 

I have ever seen.” 

■ “Rather overdone that. Curly,” said De Yigne, dryly^ 


3RANVILLE DE VIGNE 


327 


“ considering all the regular beauties you have fallen dovrn 
before and worshiped, and that poor little Alma is no 
regular beauty at alb” 

“ No, she’s much better,” said Curly, decidedly. “ Where’s 
your regular beauty that’s worth that l-Hle dear’s grace, 
and vivacity, and lovely coloring ?” 

De Vigne put up his eyebrows as if he would not give 
much for the praise of such a universal admirer as Curly 
was of all degrees and orders of the beau sexe. 


II. 

LE CHAT QUI DORM AIT. 

“ Who is that Little Tressillian they were talking of at 
De Yigne’s the other night ?” Sabretasche asked me one 
morning, in the window at White’s — his club, par excel- 
lence, where he was referee and criterion on all things of 
art, fashion, and society, and where his word could crush a 
belle, sell a picture, and condemn a coterie. 

He shrugged his shoulders as I told him, and stroked his 
moustaches : 

“Yery little good will come of (hat; at least for her; 
for him there will be an amusement for a time, then a cer- 
tain regret — remorse, perhaps, as he is very generous- 
hearted — and then a separation, and — oblivion.” 

“ Do you think so ? I fancy De Yigne paid too heavy 
a price for passion to have any fancy to let its reins loose 
again.” 

“ Mon cher, mon cher !” cried Sabretasche, impatiently, 
“if Phaeton had not been killed by that thunderbolt, do 
you suppose that the bouleversement and the conflagration 


828 


GRANVILLE EE VIGNE. 


would have deterred hira from driving his father’s chariot 
as often as Sol would have let hira had it 

Possibly not ; but I mean that De Vigne is thoroughly 
steeled against all female humanity. The sex of the Tre- 
fusis cannot possibly, he thinks, have any good in it ; and 
I believe he only takes what notice he does of Alma Tres- 
sillian from friendship for her old grandfather, and pity for 
her desolate position.” 

“Friendship — pity ? For Heaven’s sake, Arthur, do not 
you, a man of the world, talk such nonsense. To what, 
pray, do friendship and pity invariably bring men and 
women? De Yigne and his protegee are walking upon 
mines.” 

“Which will explode beneath them ?” 

“Sans doute. We are, unhappily, mortal, mon ami! 
I will go down and see this Alma Tressillian some day 
when I have nothing to do. Let me see; she is painting 
that little picture for me, of course, that I ordered of him 
from his unknown artist. He must take me down ; I shall 
soon see how the land lies between them.” 

Accordingly, Sabretasche one day, when De Yigne and 
he were driving down to a dinner at the Castle, took out 
his watch, and found they would be there twenty minutes 
too early, from De Yigne’s clocks having been too fast. 

“We shall be there half an hour too soon, my dear fel- 
low. Turn aside, and take me to see this little friend of 
yours with the pretty name and the pretty pictures. If 
you refuse, I shall think Yane Castleton is right, and that 
you are like the famed dog in the manger. I have a right 
to see the artist that is executing my own order.” 

De Yigne nodded, and turned the horses’ heads toward 
St. Crucis, not with an over good grace, though, for he 
knew Sabretasche’s reputation was that he was as cruel as 
he was winning to the fair sex ; and the Colonel, with hia 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


S2tJ 

fascination and his bonnes fortunes, was not exactly tbo 
man that, whether dog in the manger or not, De Vigne 
thought a very safe friend for his “Little Tressilliari.” But 
he did not care enough about it to make an excuse, if he 
had had one, and -there was no possibility of resisting 
Sabretasche when he had set his mind upon anything 
Very quietly, very gently, but very securely, he kept his 
hold upon it till he had it yielded up to him. I believe it 
was that quality, more than even his beauty and his attrac- 
tions, which gave him his Juanesque reputation and suc- 
cess. 

So De Vigne had to introduce the Colonel to little 
Alma, who received them with her usual ease and grace, 
so singularly free alike from gene or boldness, awkward- 
ness or freedom. Sabretasche dropped into an easy-chair 
beside her, with his eye-glass up, and began to talk to her. 
He was a great adept in l^e art of “bringing out.” He 
had a way of hovering over a woman, and fixing his beauti- 
ful eyes on her, and talking softly and pleasantly, so that 
the subject under his skillful mesmerism developed talent 
that might otherwise never have gleamed out; and with 
Alma, who could talk with any and everybody on all sub- 
jects under the sun, from metaphysics and ethics to her 
kitten’s collar, and who would discuss philosophies with 
you as readily as she would chatter nonsense to her parrot, 
it is needless to say Sabretasche had little diflBculty. 

De Vigne, Sabretasche’s only rival at club and mess 
rooms in wit, and repartee, and varied, original conversa- 
tion, let the Colonel have all the, talk to himself, half 
irritated — he scarcely knew why — at the sight of his im- 
movable and inquiring eye-glass, and the sound of his low, 
trainante, musical voice. Now and then, amidst his con- 
versation, the Colonel shot a glance at him, and went on 
Hith his criticisms on art, sacred, legendary, and historic; 

28 * 


S30 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB. 


on painting in the medieval and the modern styles, with 
such a deep knowledge and refined appreciation of his 
subject as few presidents of the R. A. have ever shown in 
their lectures. 

At last De Vigne rose, impatient past endurance, though 
be could hardly have told you why. 

“It is half-past six, Sabretasche ; the turbot and turtle 
will be cold.” 

The Colonel smiled; 

“Thank you, my dear fellow; there are a few things in 
life more attractive than turtle or turbot. The men will 
wait; they would be the last to hurry us if they knew our 
provocation to delay.” 

De Yigne could have found it in his heart to have kicked 
the Colonel for that speech, and the soft sweet glance 
accompanying it. “He will spoil that little thing,” he 
thought, angrily. “No woman’s head is strong enough 
to stand his and Curly’s flattery.” 

“I like your little lady, De Vigne,” said Sabretasche, as 
they drove away. “She is really very charming, good 
style, and strikingly clever.” 

“ She is not mine,” said De Vigne, with a haughty stare 
of surprise. 

“Weill she will be, I dare say.” 

“Indeed no. I did not suppose your notions of my 
honor, or rather dishonor, were like Vane Castleton’s.” 

“Nor are they, cher ami,” said the Colonel, with that 
grave gentleness which occasionally replaced his worldly 
wit and gay ordinary tone. “But like him I know the 
world; and I know, as you would, too, if you thought a 
moment, that a man of your age cannot have that sort of 
friendly intercourse with a girl of hers without its surely 
ripening into something infinitely warmer and more dan 
gerous. You would be the first to sneer at an attempt at 


(3RANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


331 


platonics in another; you are the last man in the world to 
dream of such follies yourself. Tied as you are by the 
cruelty and absurdity of Church and Law, you cannot fre- 
quent the society of a girl as fascinating as your little 
friend yonder without danger for her; and for you, with 
your generous nature, probably regret and remorse, or, at 
the least, satiety and regret. With nine men out of ten 
the result would be love and a liaison lightly formed and 
as lightly broken ; but you have an uncommon nature, and 
a young girl like Little Tressillian your own warmth of 
heart would never let you desert and leave unprotected. I 
hate advising; I never do it to anybody. My life has left 
me little title to counsel men against sins and follies which 
I daily commit myself, nor do I count as sins many things 
the world condemns as such. Only here I see so plainly 
what will come of it, that I do not like you to rush into it 
blindfold and repent of it afterward. Because you have 
had fifty such loves which cost you nothing, that is no 
reason that the fifty-first may not cost you some pain, some 

very great pain, in its formation or its severance ” 

“You mean very kindly, Sabretasche, but there is no 
question of ‘love’ here,” interrupted De Yigne, with his 
impatient hauteur. “In the first place, you, so well read 
in woman’s character, might know she is far too frank 
and familiar with me for any fear of the kind in another, 
I have paid too much for passion ever to risk it again. I 
am not a boy to fall into a thing whether I like it or not, 
and I hope I know too well what is due from honor and 
generosity to win the love of a young and unprotected girl 
like Alma while I am by my own folly fettered and cursed 
by marriage ties. Sins enough I have upon my soul, God 
knows, but there is no danger of my erring here. I have 
no temptation; but if I had I should resist it; to take 
advantage of her innocence and ignorance of my history 


332 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


would be a blackguard’s act, to which no madness, even if 
I felt it, would ever make me condescend to stoop I” 

De Yigne spoke with all the sternness and impatience 
natural to him when roused, spoke in overstrong terms, as 
men do of a fault they are sure they shall never commit 
themselves. Sabretasche listened, an unusual angry shadow 
gathering in his large soft eyes, and a bitter sneer on his 
pale delicate features, as he leaned back and folded his 
arms to silence and dolce. 

“Most immaculate pharisee! Hemember a divine in- 
junction, ‘Let him that standeth.take heed lest he fall.’” 

De Vigne cut his horses impatiently with the whip. 

“ I am no pharisee, but I am, with all my faults and vices, 
a man of honor still.” 

Sabretasche answered nothing, but annoyance was still 
in his eyes, and a sneer still on his lips. In a few minutes 
they had reached the Castle, and over their Rhenish and 
entremets De Yigne and Sabretasche laughed and talked 
as though they had quite forgotten their approach to a 
quarrel. They were too wise men, and too attached to 
one another, to split upon straws. Sabretasche was really 
a very sweet temper. He was wont to say anger was such 
a trouble and exertion that no man who knew how to 
enjoy life would allow himself to feel it. De Yigne was a 
hot and fiery temper, but if he was wrong he would own 
it with frank grace; and if he had been in a fury and 
passion with you, he never by any chance bore you malice, 
and, as his poor mother used to say, the sun shone all the 
sweeter for the momentary tempest. 

De Yigne had one fault, which I must have described 
his character very badly to you if you have not already 
seen, namely, that if advised not to do a thing, that thing 
would he go and do straightway ; moreover, being a maa 
of strong will and resolve, very fastidious in his own honor 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


333 


and very reliant on his own strength, he was too apt, as in 
his fatal marriage, to go headlong, perfectly safe in his own 
power to guide himself, to judge for himself, and to draw 
back when it was needful. Therefore, he paid no attention 
whatever to Sabretasche’s counsels, but, as it chanced, went 
down to see Alma rather more often than he had done 
before ; for she, when talking once of her pictures, had 
said how much she wished she could exhibit at the Water- 
Color Society, which De Yigne, knowing something of the 
president, and of the society in general, had been able to 
manage for her, greatly to her own delight, for Alma had 
all the natural ambition of true talent to make itself known 
and admired. De Yigne, too, was pleased to be the means 
of giving her pleasure, for he was by nature formed to do 
kindnesses where he liked people, and to enjoy seeing his 
kindness bring fruit of joy for others; and little Alma was 
now the only one to whom he softened, and hers the only 
gratitude expressed to him in which he believed. 

‘‘What should I do without you?” said Alma, fervently, 
to him one day, when he went there to tell her her picture 
was accepted. “Oh ! you are so kind to me. Sir Folko I” 

“I ? Not at all, petite,” laughed he. “I have nothing 
benevolent in my composition, I assure you.” 

“Benevolent! No,” laughed Alma, indignantly, “that 
is a horrid word; that means a man who is as kind to his 
next-door neighbor as to the person he loves best in the 
world. Benevolent means a Jenkinson with white hair 
and unctuous words — a man who goes about for other 
people’s destitute orphans or ragged children, and quite 
forgets to be sweet-tempered to his wife or generous to 
his own sons. Benevolent is as bad for a man’s character 
as a shabby hat for his appearance. No, Sir Folko, you 
arc much better than benevolent; you are generous, and 


834 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


true, and noble-hearted, and do real kindnesses unseen, 
not ostentatious ones that men may praise you.” 

“That is no merit; I dislike praise, and hate to -bo 
thanked. But, my dear child, I wish you would not exalt 
me to such a pinnacle. What will you say when I tumble 
down one day, and you see nothing of me but worthless 
shivers ?” 

“ Reverence you still,” said Alma, softly. “A fragment 
of the Parthenon is worth a whole spotless and unbroken 
modern building. If my ideal were to fall, I should treas- 
ure the dust. The dead prince’s heart was valued more 
than a thousand living ordinary ones of commonplace and 
useless Lowlanders.” 

“By the Douglas, perhaps; scarcely by the poor Low- 
landers themselves,” said De Vigne, half smiling. “But, 
seriously, I wish you would not get into the habit of rating 
me so high, Alma. I don’t in the least come up to it. You 
do not guess — how should you ? — you cannot even in fancy, 
picture the life that I, and men like me, lead ; you cannot 
imagine the wild follies with which we drown our past, 
the reckless pleasures with which we pass our present, our 
temptations, our weaknesses, our errors; how should you, 
child as you are, living out of the world in a solitude 
peopled only with the bright fancies of your own pure 
imagination, that never incarnates the hideous fauns and 
beckoning bacchanals which haunt and fever ours ?” 

“But I can,” said Alma, earnestly, looking up to him 
with her dark-blue eyes, in which even he, skeptic as he 
was in women, could see no guile and no concealment. 
“I do not go into the world, it is true, but stdl I know 
the world to a certain extent; it is not possibL to read, 
as I have don-e, the broader and freer range of idiinkers, 
which you tell me are defendus to girls of my age without 
learning more of the thoughts, temptations, and iop^ulses 


GRANVILLE 1)E VIGNE. 


335 


of men than a young lady can learn by a few waltzes in a 
•ball-room, or the vapid talk of ordinary society. Mon- 
taigne, Rochefoucauld, Rabelais, Goethe, Emerson, Bo- 
lingbroke, the translated classics, do you not think they 
teach me the world, or, at least, of what makes the world, 
Human Nature, better than the few hours at a dinner-table, 
or the gossip of morning calls, which you tell me is all girls 
like me, in good society, are allowed to see of life? You 
know. Sir Folko, it always seems to me that women, fenced 
in as they are in educated circles by boundaries which they 
cannot overstep, except to their own hinderance, screened 
from all temptations, deprived of all opportunity to wander, 
if they wished, out of the beaten track, should be all the 
gentler to your sex, whose whole life is one long tempta- 
tion, and to whose lips is almost forced that Circean ‘cup 
of life’ whose flowers round its brim hide the poisons at its 
dregs. Women have, if they acknowledge them, passions, 
ambitions, impatience at their own monotonous role, long- 
ings for the living life denied to them ; but everything tends 
to crush these down in them, has thus tended through so 
many generations, that now it has come to be an accepted 
thing that they must be calm, fair, pulseless, passionless 
statues, and when here and there a woman dares to ac- 
knowledge that her heart beats, and that nature is not wholly 
dead within her, the world stares at her, and rails at her, 
for there is no bete noire so terrible to the world as Truth I 
No, Sir Folko, though I am a girl — a child, as you say, in 
knowledge and experience, compared with you — I can fancy 
your temptations, I can picture your errors and your follies, 
I can understand how you drink your absinthe one hour 
because you liked its flavor, and drink more the next hour 
to make you forget your weakness in having yielded to it 
at all That ray own solitude and imagination are only 
peopled with shapes bright and fair, I must thank Heaven 


336 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and not myself. If I had been born in squalor and nursed 
m yice, what would circumstance and surroundings have 
made me ? Oh, I think, instead of the pharisee’s pre- 
sumptuous ‘I thank God that I am holier than he,’ we, 
with human nature strong within us, and error ready at 
any moment to burst out, and passion beating so warmly 
in us as it does in the hearts of even the coldest and most 
prudent, our thanksgiving should be, ‘ I thank God that I 
have so little opportunity to do evil!’ and we should for- 
give, as we wish to be forgiven ourselves, those whose 
temptations, either from their own nature, or from the 
outer world, have been so much greater than our own.” 

Her voice was wonderfully musical, with a strange timbre 
of pathos in it; her gesticulation had all the grace and 
fervor of her Southern Europe origin ; her eyes and lips — 
indeed, her whole face — were singularly expressive of the 
thoughts that lay in her fertile and fervid mind, and spoke 
themselves in natural and untutored eloquence. Her words 
sent a strange thrill to He Yigne’s heart; they were the 
first gentle, the first sympathizing, and the first tolerant 
words he had heard from a woman’s lips since his mother 
had died. He had known but two classes of women : those 
who shared his errors and pandered to his pleasures, whose 
life disgusted, while their beauty lured him ; and those who, 
piquing themselves on a superiority of virtue, perhaps not 
seldom unjustly denounced the shortcomings of others, 
giving the coup de Jarnac to those already gone down 
under society’s kicks and cuffs, whose illiberality equally 
disgusted him in another way, and whose sermons only 
roused him to more wayward rebellion against the social 
laws which they expounded. It touched him singularly 
to hear words at once so true, so liberal, and so humble, 
from one on whose young life he knew that no stiaiii had 
rested ; to meet with so much comprehension and so much 


GR.VNVILLE DE VIGNE. 


337 


syrapathy from a heart, compared with his own, as pure 
and spotless from all error as the snow-white roses in her 
windows, on which the morning dewdrops rested without 
soil. Wide as was the difference between them, in the 
liberality of thought there was unison of mind; in the 
passion and warmth of heart, now checked in the man, 
still sleeping in the girl, there was similarity of character, 
and at her words something of De Vigne’s old nature 
began to wake into new existence, as, after a long and 
weary sleep, the eyelids tremble before the soul arouses to 
the heat and action of the day. 

As he looked down in those dangerous eyes of hers, a 
memory of the woman whom Church and Law in their 
cruel folly called his wife passed over him — he could 
scarcely tell why or how — with a cold chill, like the air of 
a pestilent charnel-house. 

^‘Alma, if women were like you, men might be better 
than they are. Child, I wish you would not talk as you 
do. You wake up thoughts and memories that had far 
better sleep.” 

She touched his hand gently with her own little fingers: 

“Sir Folko, what are those memories?” 

He drew his hand away and laughed, not joyously, but 
that laugh which has less joy in it even than tears : 

“Don’t you know a proverb, Alma — ‘N’eveillez pas le 
chat qui dort?’ ” 

“But were the cat a tiger I would not fear it, if it were 
yours.” 

“But I fear it.” 

There was more meaning in that than little Alma guessed. 
The impetuous passion that had blasted his life and linked 
his name with the Trefusis would be, while his life lasted, 
a giant whose throes and mighty will would always hold 
him captive in his chains. 

VOL. I. 29 to 


338 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


He was silent; he sat looking out of the window by 
which he sat, and playing with a branch of the white rose 
that stood in a stand among the other flowers he had sent 
her. His lips were pressed together, his eyebrows slightly 
contracted, his dark eagle eyes sad and troubled, as if he 
were looking far away — so he was — to a white headstone 
lying among fragrant violet tufts under the old elms at 
Vigne, with the spring sunshine in its fitful lights and 
shadows playing fondly round the name of the only woman 
who had loved him at once fondly and unselfishly. 

Alma looked at him long and wistfully, some of his 
darker shadows flung on her own bright and sunny nature 
— as the yew-tree throws the dark beauty of its boughs 
over the golden cowslips that nestle at its roots. 

At last she bent forward, lifting her soft frank eyes 
to his. 

“ Sir Folko, where are your thoughts ? Tell me ; you 
may trust me.” 

Her voice won its way to his heart ; he knew that in- 
terest, not curiosity, spoke in it, and he answered gently, 

‘‘With my mother.” 

It was the first time he had spoken of her to Alma — ho 
never breathed her name to any one. Alma looked up at 
him, her face full of tenderness and pity. 

“You loved her dearly?” 

“Very dearly.” 

Alma’s eyes filled with tears, a passion very rare with her 

“ Tell me of her,” she said, softly. 

“No I I cannot talk of her.” 

“Because you loved her so much?” 

“No 1 Because I killed her.” 

That was the great sorrow of his life; that his folly had 
30st him his name, and, as he considered, his honor, warf 
less bitter to him than that it had cost his mother’^ life. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


339 


Alma, at his reply — uttered almost involuntarily under 
his breath — gazed at him, horror-stricken, with wild terror 
ill her large eyes; yet De Yigne might have noticed that 
she did not shrink from him, but rather drew the closer to 
him. Her expression recalled his thoughts. 

“Not that, not that,” he said, hastily. “My hand never 
harmed her, but my passions did. My own headlong and 
willful folly sent her to her grave. Child! you may well 
thank God if Temptation never enter your life. No man 
has strength against it.” 

Alma’s face still spoke all the full yet silent sympathy 
that best chimed in with his haughty and fiery spirit, which 
craved and demanded the warmest, yet at the same time 
most delicate, comprehension. It was the sort of sympathy 
which lures on men to confessions which they would never 
make to another man — a sympathy which assures them 
that whatever sins they recount there will be pity and 
excuse made fondly for them. 

For the first time* De Yigne felt an inclination to dis- 
close his marriage to Alma Tressillian ; to tell her what 
he would have told to no other living being : of all his own 
madness had cost him, of the fatal revenge the Trefusis 
had taken, of the headlong impetuosity which had led him 
to raise the daughter of a beggar-woman to one of the 
proudest names in England, of the fatal curse which he 
had drawn on his own head, and the iron fetters which his 
own hand had forged. The words were already on his 
lips. I cannot tell what there was in the Little Tressillian 
to wir. upon him so, but certain it is that in another minute 
he would have bent his pride and laid bare his secret to 
her, if at that moment the door had not opened — to admit 
Alma’s quasi-governess, Miss Russell. 

Alma was very right — our life hinges upon Oppor- 
tunity ’ 


340 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


De Yigne never again felt a wish to tell her of his mar- 
riage. 

He rose, Alma rose too, sorry, for the first time in her 
life, to see her friend ; and Miss Russell, a little, quietly- 
dressed, timid woman, the perfection of a vieille fille, 
(whose life, Alma has confessed to me, she made somewhat 
of a burden to her, with her heterodox opinions and wild 
spirits, and who must have been often horrified, poor lady I 
by her pupil’s daring independence and imaginative flights,) 
looked with mild astonishment at Alma kneeling down 
before De Yigne, and at De Yigne’s stately figure and 
statuesque head, which were not without a certain effect 
upon her — as on what daughter of Eve, however far gone 
in years or prudery, would they not have been ? 

De Yigne went up to her, with his “grand air” and his 
courtly manner, always most courtly where the recipients 
of it were in an inferior position to himself, and claimed 
his recollection. He had seen her once, before Boughton 
Tressillian’s departure for Lorave — a fact entirely forgot- 
ten by him, but of which Alma had assured him. Miss 
Russell remembered him by dint of having had his name 
dinned into her ears all the years she had been with Alma, 
but looked upon him with some little disquietude never- 
theless; for it is noticeable that vieilles filles who have 
escaped from our grififes rather more completely than they 
could have wished, invariably regard us as most dangerous 
beasts of prey. 

De Yigne stayed with her some twenty minutes, chatting 
chiefly of old Tressillian; then he left, for he did not much 
care for his visit to Alma if it was not a tete-a-tete, and 
the roll of the tilbury grew fainter and fainter as he drove 
down the road, remembering, for the first time, what he 
had come to tell the girl, that her picture was accepted by 
the Society. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


341 


As soon as he was gone, Miss Russell took it upon he”- 
Bclf to expostulate with her quondam pupil as to the non- 
advisability of such tete-a-tete calls. She had known 
nothing of them before, living in a family at Windsor, 
which she was seldom able to leave for a visit to her old 
pet and favorite. 

“Now do be quiet, you dear old thing I” cried Alma, at 
the first of Miss Russell’s prudent periods. “You know 
your dreadfully stiff ideas were the only rock on which you 
and I ever quarreled. I never subscribed to them, and 
never shall. I have told you how I met Major de Vigne. 
He is the best friend on earth I have. He is never weary 
of doing me kindnesses. There is no generosity which he 
would stop at if I would accept it. He finds purchasers 
for my pictures, and praises them, and gets them put in 
exhibitions — he who has Guidos, and Poussins, and Land- 
seers on his walls I He is noble-hearted, honorable, gen- 
erous as the sunlight; and the royalty of his intellect is 
only equaled by the royalty of his heart I And then you 
tell me it is ‘improper’ to receive him, ‘unwise’ to like 
him. You might as well tell the flowers not to like the 
clouds, whose morning shade and evening dews make all 
their life and beauty I” 

Miss Russell sighed. Well she might, poor luckless 
lady I for Alma’s vehement rush of words, and her impas- 
sioned Italian gesticulation, to say nothing of her opinions, 
were calculated to overwhelm and crush a whole legion of 
such timid and gentle mortals as her poor governess. 

“But, my dear child,” she ventured mildly, “it is not the 
custom for young ladies, situated as you are, to receive the 
visits of young unmarried men — you must allow that?” 

“I allow it,” laughed Alma; “but, to begin with, there 
are few young ladies situated as I am, all alone in a horri- 
ble farm-house with nothing in the world to talk to but a 
29 * 


842 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


goldfiucn and a dog, (till he came and gave me my darling 
Pauline, Inok at her beautiful green and yellow and scarlet 
feathers !) Heaven forefend there should be, poor things I 
for it is by no means a delightful existence, without society, 
fun, or pleasant sauce of any kind I In the second, a^jj^iave 
often assured you, only you never would believe me, the 
ways of the world are not always right ways, and verv 
seldom agreeable ones ; and a little nature, and gratitude, 
and warm feeling are worth all their conventionalities and 
prudence. In the third, his visits might honor a queen, 
and they are the single joy of my life. Even the brute 
Caliban knew how to feel grateful, and shall I be lower 
and less quick in feeling than Major de Vigne’s dogs and 
horses, who love him for his care, his kindness, and his 
gentleness 

Miss Russell was puzzled, as your worldly-wise people 
sometimes are by those who are only nature-wise. 

“ Be as grateful as you please, my love ; Heaven forbid 
I should seem to teach you ingratitude or mistrust; but 
don’t you know, my dear child, that women, especially 
young and inexperienced ones, Alma, cannot be too cir- 
cumspect in their conduct ? They are so easily misconstrued, 
and, unhappily, my dear child, men are so apt to take 
advantage of ” 

Alma’s face glowed crimson in an instant, and her eyes 
flashed fiercely with that Southern passion which lay under- 
neath her laughing, careless gayety of nature. 

“I understand you,” she said, haughtily, “but I am not 
afraid of being ‘misconstrued,’ or ‘taken advantage of,’ as 
you suggest. Men of the world are truer judges of char- 
acter than our censorious and purblind sex, and a gentleman 
of honor is as safe a friend as the ivorld holds.” 

“I hope so,” sighed Miss Russell, quite bewildered; 
“but I have certainly heard something against Major De 


GRANVILIE DE VIGNE. 


813 


Vigne. I cannot remember what, but I think — I fancy — 
he has been very wild 

“Possibly,” said Alma, her little soft lips curling con- 
temptuously. “Whatever you may have heard I shall 
request you to keep it to yourself. I will hear nothing, 
even'from you, detrimental to Major De Vigne.” 

Miss Russell was shut up I the stronger character of the 
young one cowed the weaker disposition of the elder and 
more timid woman. Alma changed the subject, and busied 
herself, in her rapid and graceful way, in making her 
governess welcome, in’ showing her her pictures, in intro- 
ducing Sylvo and Pauline to her notice, in a hundred pretty 
little petits soins, which sat very charmingly on her, though 
she was about the least “ domestic ” young lady I ever came 
across ; but there was a lack of that entire confidence in 
Miss Russell, and joyous pleasure in her society, which her 
pet pupil had always before demonstrated. Poor cause: 
Miss Russell had spoken against the god of her idolatry — 
De Vigne. 

There are gods still, as in the days of Ancient Priest- 
craft, on whose altars are offered up with tears of blood no 
holocaust less costly than a human heart — quivering with 
paortal life, throbbing with vital pain I 


344 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB 


PART THE TWELFTH. 


I. 


PAOLO AND FRANCESCA. 

May came ; it was the height of the season ; town was 
full ; her Majesty had given her first levee ; Belgravia and 
Mayfair were occupied; the Ride and the Ring were full, 
too, at six o’clock every day, and the thousand toys with 
which Babylon amuses her grown babies were ready, 
among others the Exhibition of Fine Arts, where, on its 
first day. He Yigne and I went to lounge away an hour, 
chiefly for the great entertainment and fun alforded to 
persons of sane mind by the eccentricities of the pre- 
Raphaelite gentlemen. 

In the entrance we met Lady Molyneux and her daugh- 
ter, Sabretasche and his young Grace of Regalia with them. 
It was easy to see which the Viscountess favored the most. 
Regalia would have made her a charming son-in-law, being 
weak, good-natured, and rich a ravir; but as he was small, 
sandy-haired, limited his criticisms to “Oh!” “Ah I” “I 
seel” “Really!” “Dooced fine!” etc., it was perhaps 
natural that Violet was more blinded to his irreproach- 
able character and advantageous position than she ought 
to have been, and gave all her attention to the Colonel, 
with his silvery tongue and beautiful face, and explana- 
tions of art at once masterly and poetic, the explanations 
of a refined scholar and a profound critic. 

“Are you come to be desenchante with all living woman- 
hood by the contemplation of Messrs. Millais and Hunt’s 
idealvS, Major De Yigne?” asked Violet, giving him her 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


S45 


har.d, looking a very lovely sample of “living woman- 
hood,” in her dainty toilette and her perfect- fitting gloves, 
and her little cobweb black lace veil, than through which 
a pretty woman never looks prettier. Ladies said she was 
very extravagant in dress. She might be; she was natu- 
rally lavish; and worshiped instinctively all that was 
graceful in form or coloring; but I only know she dressed 
perfectly, and, what was better still, never thought about it. 

“Perhaps we should suffer less disappointment if ladies 
were like Millais’s ideals,” smiled De Vigne. “ From those 
rough, red-haired, long-limbed women we should never look 
for much perfection ; whereas the faces and forms of our 
living beauties are rather like belladonna, beautiful to look 
at, but destruction to approach or trust!” 

“You are incorrigible!” cried Violet, with a tiny shrug 
of her shoulders, “and forget that if belladonna is a poison 
to those who don’t know how to use it, it is a medicine and 
a balm to those who do.” 

“But for one cautious enough to cure himself, how many 
unwary are poisoned for life !” laughed De Vigne. 

He said it as a jest, to tease her, but a bitter memory 
prompted it. 

“Send that fellah to Coventry, Miss Molyneux, do,” 
lisped Regalia; “he’s so dweadfiilly rude.” 

“Not yet; sarcasms are infinitely more refreshing thau 
empty compliments,” said Violet, with a scornful flash of 
her brilliant eyes. The little Duke was idiot enough to 
attempt to flatter Violet Molyneux, to whom the pas in 
beauty and talent was indisputably given. “ Colonel Sa- 
bi’etasche, take my catalogue, I have not looked into it 
yet, and mark all our favorites for me. I am going to 
enjoy the pictures now, and talk to nobody.” 

A charming ruse on the young lady’s part to keep Sa- 
hretasche at her side and make him ta"k to her, for they 


346 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


passed ov^r eleven pictures, and lingered over a twelfth, 
while he discoursed on the Italian and the French, the 
German and the English schools, with rapid sketches of 
past styles, and graphic anecdotes of Yernet and Leslie, 
in a manner that soon enabled them to lose Lady Moly- 
neux, talking pieces out of Ruskin, with her glass up, to 
poor young Regalia, only suppressing his yawns and keep- 
ing his post from pure courtesy, though my lady was a 
very pretty woman, and, in her own opinion at least, as 
bewitching to a young fellow as her daughter, of whom, 
entre nous, she was not a little jealous. 

“Why have you never been to see me for four days?” 
asked Violet, standing before one of the glorious sea 
pieces of Stanfield. 

Sabretasche hesitated a moment. 

“I have had other engagements.” 

Violet’s eyes flashed. “I beg your pardon. Colonel 
Sabretasche; not being changeable myself, it did not 
occur to me that you were so. However, if it is a 
matter of so little moment to you, it is of still less to 
me.” 

“Did I not tell you,” whispered Sabretasche, “that I 
like too well to be with you to dare to be with you much ? 
You cannot have forgotten our conversation at Rich- 
mond ?” 

The color rushed into Violet’s cheeks under her little 
filmy veil. 

“No,” she answered, hurriedly; “but you promised me 
your friendship, and you have no right to take it away. I 
do not pretend to understand you, I do not seek to know 
more than you choose to tell me, but since yon once prom- 
ised to be my friend, you have no right to behave capri- 
ciously to me.” 

“ Violet, for God’s sake do not break my heart I” broke 


GRANVILLE I)E VIGNE, 


347 


in 8abretasche, his voice scarcely above his breath, but full 
of such intense anguish that Violet was startled. “Your 
friend I cannot be ; anything dearer I may not be. For- 
get me and all interest in my fate. Of your interest in me 
I am utterly unworthy ; and I would rather that you 
should credit all the evil that the world attributes to me, and, 
crediting it, learn to hate me, than think that I, in my own 
utter selfishness, had thrown one shade on your young life, 
mingled one regret with your bright future.’’ 

They were both leaning against the rail ; no one saw 
Violet’s face as she answered him. 

“ To speak of hate from me to you is folly, and it is too 
late to command forgetfulness. If you had no right to 
make me remember you, you have still less right to bid 
me forget you.” 

“Violet, come and look at this picture of Lance’s, Re- 
galia talks of buying it,” said her mother’s cold, slow, 
languid voice. 

Violet turned, and though she smiled and spoke about 
the picture in question with some of her old vivacity and 
self-possession, her face had lost its brilliant tinting, and 
her little white teeth were set together. 

De Vigne joined them at that minute. 

“ Miss Molyneux, I want to show you a painting in the 
Middle Room. It is just your style, I fancy. Will you 
come and look at it ?” 

We all went into the Middle Room after him. Sabre- 
tasche too, pausing occasionally to look at some of the 
luckless exiles near the ceiling with his lorgnon. By-the- 
way, what a farce it is to hang pictures where one must 
have a lorgnon to look at them; the exhibition of the few 
is the suppression of the many I 

“Voilal” said De Vigne. “Am I wrong? Don’t yon 
like it 


S48 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ Like it I” echoed Violet. “ 0 Heaven, he w beauti- 
ful I” 

Quite forgetful that she was the center of a crowd who 
were looking at her much more than at the paintings on 
the walls, she stood, the color back in her cheeks, her eyes 
lifted to the picture, her whole face full of reverent love 
and fervent adoration for. the beauty it embodied. The 
painting deserved it. It was Love — old in story, yet new 
to every human heart — the love of Francesca and Paolo, 
often essayed by artists, yet never rendered as the poet 
would have had it, as it was rendered here. 

There were no vulgarities of a fabled Hell ; there were 
the two, alone in that true torture — 

Eicordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria — 

yet happy because together. Her face and form were in 
full light, his in shadow. Heart beating against heart, 
their arms round each other, they looked down into each 
other’s eyes. On his face were the fierce passions, against 
which he had no strength, mingled with the deep and 
yearning regret for the fate he had drawn in with his 
own. 

On hers, lifted up to him, was all the love at sight of 
which he who beheld it “ swooned even as unto death,” the 
love — 

piacer si forte 

Che come vedi ancor non m’abbandona — 

the love which made hell, paradise, and torture together 
dearer than heaven alone. Her face spoke, her clinging 
arms circled him as though defying power in heaven strong 
enough to part them ; her eyes looked into his with unut- 
terable tenderness, anguish for his sorrow, ecstasy in his 
presence I and on her soft lips, still trembling with the 
memory of that first kiss which had been their ruin, w^ia 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


349 


all the heroism and all the passion, all the fiaelity, entnu* 
siasra, and joy in him alone, spoken in that one sentence — 

Qucsti che mai da me non fia diviso! 

The picture told its tale ; crowds gathered round it ; and 
those who could not wholly appreciate its wonderful col- 
oring and skill were awed by its living humanity, its pas- 
sionate tenderness, its exquisite beauty. 

Violet stood, regardless of the men and women around 
her, looking up at the Francesca, a fervent response to it, 
a yearning sympathy with the warm human love and pas- 
sionate joys of which it breathed, written on her mobile 
features. 

She turned away from it with a heavy sigh, and the 
flush deepened in her cheeks as she met Sabretasche’s eyes, 
who now stood behind her. 

“You are pleased with that picture,” he said, bending 
his head. 

“Is it not beautiful?” cried Violet, passionately. “It 
is not to be criticised ; it is to be loved. It is art and 
poetry and human nature blended in one. Whoever 
painted it interprets art as no other artist here can do. 
He has loved and felt his subject, and makes others in the 
force of his genius feel and love it too. Listen how every 
one is praising it 1 They all admire it, yet not nine out of 
ten of these people can understand it. Tell me who 
painted it, quick 1 Now you ^.re looking in the last 
room, and it is 226, Middle Room. Oh I give me the 
catalogue I” 

She took it out of his hands with that rapid vivacity 
which worried her mother so dreadfully as bad ton, and 
made her greatest charm to us, turned the leaves over with 
the greatest impatience till she reached “226.* Paolo and 
Francesca — Vivian Sabretasche. 

30 


VOL. 1. 


350 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Amor che a nullo amato amar perJona, 

Mi prese del costui piacer si forte, 

Che come vedi ancor non m’abbandona 
Amor condusse noi ad ana morte.” 

She dropped the book ; she turned to him with such 
intense delight that it was almost pain; she could not 
speak, but she held out her hand to him. Sabretasche 
took it for an instant as they leaned over the rail together 
in the security and “solitude of a crowd.” 

“ Do not speak of it here,” he whispered, as he bent down 
for the fallen catalogue. 

Violet gave him a glance so full of sympathy, delight, 
and adoration, that she had no need of words. 

“’Pon my honor, Sabretasche,” whispered little Regalia, 
“we’re all so astonished — turning artist, eh? Never knew 
you exhibited. Splendid picture — ah — really !” 

“You do me much honor,” said Sabretasche, coldly — . 
he hated the little puppy who was always dawdling after 
Violet — “but I should prefer not to be congratulated 
before a room full of people.” 

“ On my life, old fellow, I envy you,” said De Vigne, too 
low for any one to hear him; “not for being the talk of 
the room, for that is neither, to your taste nor mine, but 
for having such magnificent talent as you have given us 
here.” 

“Cui bono?” said Sabretasche, with his slight smile, 
that was too gentle for discontent and too sad for cynicism. 

“I had not an idea whose Francesca I was bringing Miss 
Molyneux to see,” De Vigne continued. “How came you 
to exhibit this year ?” 

“Oh, I have been a dabbler in art a long time,” laughed 
the Colonel. “ Many of the Forty are my intimate friends ; 
they would'not have rejected anything I sent.” "’ '. vj ^ 

“They would have been mad to reject the Francesca; 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


351 


they have nothing to compete with it on the walls. I wish 
you were in Poland Street, Sabretasche, that one could 
order of you. You are the first fine gentleman, since Sir 
George Beaumont, who has turned ‘ artiste veritable,’ and 
you grace it better than he.” 

Sabretasche and his Grace of Regalia, De Vigne, and I, 
went to luncheon that day with Lady Molyneux in Lowndes 
Square, at which meal the Colonel made himself so in- 
tensely charming, lively, and winning, that the viscountess, 
strong as were her leanings to her pet duke, could but 
admit that he shone to very small advantage, and made a 
mental mem. never to invite the two together again. The 
Molyneux were devoting that morning to picture-viewing, 
the viscountess martyrized secretly, her daughter genuinely 
delighted. And from the Royal Academy, after luncheon, 
they went to the French aquarelles, in Pall Mall, and thence 
to the Water-Color Exhibition, whither De Yigne and I 
followed them in his tilbury. 

“I wonder what they will say to Alma’s picture,” said 
De Yigne, as we alighted. “ I wish it may make a hit, as 
it is her livelihood now, poor child I” 

Strange enough, it was before Alma’s picture that we 
found most people in the room congregated; and Yiolet 
turned to us : 

“Come and look here. Major De Yigne; this ‘Louis 
Dix-sept in the Tower of the Temple,’ by Miss Trevelyan 
— Trevanion — no, Tressillian — whoever she be — is the gem 
of the collection, to my mind. There is an unlucky green 
ticket on it, else I would purchase it. What enviable 
talent I I wish I were Miss Tressillian I” 

“ How rash you are !” said De Yigne. “How can you 
tell but what Miss Tressillian may be some masculine 
woman living in an entresol, painting with a clay pipe 
between ner teeth, and horses and cows for veritable models 


S52 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


in a litter adjoining, dressing like George Sand, and deriv* 
ing inspiration from gin 

“What a shameful picture !” cried Violet, indignantly. 
“ I do not know her, nor anything about her, it is true, 
but I am perfectly certain that the woman who realized 
and carried out this painting with so much delicacy and 
grace must have a delicate and graceful mind herself.^’ 

“Or,’^ continued De Yigne, ruthlessly, “she may now, 
for anything you can tell, be a vieille fille who has con- 
secrated her life to art, and grown old and ugly in the con- 
secration, and who ” 

“Be quiet. Major De Yigne, if you please,” interrupted 
Violet. “I am perfectly certain, I told you, that the artist 
would correspond to the picture : Raphael was as beautiful 
as his paintings, Michael Angelo was of noble appearance, 
Mozart and Mendelssohn had faces full of music, Yernet 
is a fine military-looking man ” 

“Fuseli, toe, was,” said De Yigne, mischievously, “re- 
markably like his grand archangels; Reynolds, in his 
brown coat and wig, is so poetic that one could have no 
other ideal of the ‘Golden Age;’ Turner’s appearance was 
BO artistic that one would have imagined him a farmer bent 
on crops; fat and snuflfy Handel is the embodiment of the 
beauty of the Cangio d’Aspetto ” 

“How tiresome you are !” interrupted Violet again. ‘ “I 
am establishing a theory ; I don’t care for facts — no theo- 
rists ever do in these days. I maintain that a graceful and 
ennobling art must leave its trace on the thought and mind 
and manners of its expositors, (I know you are going to 
remind me of Morland at the hedge-alehouse, of the ‘bum- 
baililF’ and the ‘little Jew-broker,’ and of Nollikens making 
the writing-paper label for the single bottle of claret;) 
never mind, I keep to my theory, and I am sure that this 
Miss Tressillian, who has had the happiness to paint the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


353 


lovely face of that little Dauphin, would, if we could see 
her, correspond to it; and I envy her without the slightest 
hesitation.” 

‘‘You have no need to envy any one,” whispered Regalia. 

Violet turned impatiently from him, and began to talk 
to Sabretasche about one of those ever-charming pictures 
of Mr. Edtiund Warren. De Vigne looked at me and 
smiled, thinking with how much more grounds the little 
Tressillian had envied Violet Molyneux. 

“ I wish I could tell you half I feel about your Fran- 
cesca,” said Violet, lifting her eyes to Sabretasche’s face, 
as they stood apart from anybody else in a part of the room 
little frequented, for there were few people there that morn- 
ing, and those few were round Alma’s pet picture. “You 
can never guess how I reverence that sublime genius of 
yours, how fully it speaks to my heart, how completely it 
reveals to me all your inner nature, which the world, much 
as it admires you, never sees or dreams of seeing.” 

Sabretasche bent his head; her words went too near 
home to him to let him answer them. 

“All your pictures,” Violet went on, “have seemed to 
me to bear the stamp of the most superb talent, but this — 

0 Heaven, how beautiful it is ! I might have known no 
other hand but yours could have called it into life. But I 
did not see it when we came to your studio. Have you 
long finished it ?” 

“ I finished the painting two years ago ; but three months 
ago I saw for the first time the face that answered my ideal, 
the face that expressed all that I would have expressed in 
Francesca. I eflaced what I had painted, and in its stead 

1 placed — yours.” 

Violet’s eyes dropped; the delicate color in her cheek.s 
wavered and deepened. She had been dimly conscious of 
a resemblance in the painting, and De Vigne’s glance from 


854 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Francesca .0 herself had told her that he at the least saw* 
it also; and, indeed, with the exception that Francesca’s 
hair was golden where Tiolet’s was chestnut, (possibly 
that gossiping Belgravia might not notice too strong a 
likeness,) the face of the painting, with its delicate and 
impassioned features, and the form, with its slight build 
and yet voluptuous graces, were singularly like'her own. 

Sabretasche looked closer at her; it was one of those 
dangerous moments when for any madness men can scarcely 
be held responsible. 

“ You could love like Francesca,” he said, involunta- 
rily. 

It was not above his breath, but his face gave it all the 
eloquence it lacked, as hers all th^ response it needed. 

She heard his short quick breathing as he stood beside 
her; she felt the passionate answer that rose to his lips; 
she knew that if ever a man’s love was hers his was then. 
But he was silent, and when he spoke his voice was full of 
that utter anguish which had startled her twice before. 

''Keep it, then, and give it to some man more worthy it 
than 1 1” 

“Violet, my love, are you not tired of all this?” said 
Lady Molyneux, sweeping up. “It is half-past four, and 
I want to go to Swan and Edgar’s. Pictures make one’s 
bead ache so; I was never so ill in my life as I was after 
the Sistine chapel,” 

Sabretasche took her to their carriage without another 
word between them ; and I grieve to record it, it was most 
improper, unladylike, and utterly against the rules, but 
Violet pressed his hand between her little French-gloved 
fingers, as if he had just made her an offer rather than 
a refusal of love, and looked up in his eyes much as his 
Francesca’s looked in Paolo’s. But then Sabretasche was 
pale as dealh; she could see bitter suffering where others 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


355 


only »aw liis usual urbane and courtly smile; and Violet 
Molyneux, happily for him, was not a conventio!ial young 
lady, but only a fond, frank, tender, impressionable woman. 

The next day, to our surprise, the Colonel asked for 
leave, got it, and went away. 

“What the deuce is that for, Colonel?” said 1. “Never 
been out of town in the season before, have you ?” 

“Just the reason why I should be now, my dear fellow,” 
responded Sabretasche, lazily. “Twenty years of the same 
thing is enough to tire one of it, if the thing were paradise 
itself; and when it comes to be only dusty paves, whitebai. 
dinners, and club gossip, ennui is very pardonable. The 
medical men tell me, if I don’t give up pleasure for a little 
time, pleasure will give up me. You know, though I am 
strong enough in muscle, I am not over-strong physically; 
so I shall go over to the Continent, and look at it in 
spring, before there are the pests of English touring about, 
with Murrays, carpet-bags, and sandwiches.” 

He vouchsafed no more on the subject, but went. His 
departure was talked of in clubs and boudoirs; women 
missed him as they would have missed no other man in 
London, for Sabretasche was universal censor, referee, 
regulator of fashion, his bow was the best thing in the 
Park, his fetes at Richmond the most charming and ex- 
clusive of the season ; but people absent on tours are 
soon forgotten, like dead leaves sucked under a water- 
wheel and whirled away; and after the first day, perhaps, 
nobody save De Yigne and I remarked how triste his 
bouse in Park Lane looked with the green persiennes 
closed over its sunny bay-windows. 


S56 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE 


II. 

PALAMON AND ARCITE. 

A FEW days after his departure I cantered down the 
Ride with Violet Molyneux. 

“This will be a brilliant season, I think,” said I, “and 
an unusually long one. They were talking of parliament 
not closing till July, as there is so much business to be 
done. If such a thing ever happened as to detain the 
two Houses over the 12th, I am sure my father would 
have a fit of apoplexy, and all St. Stephen’s with him.” 

“Yes,” answered Violet, smiling, “the Lords and Cora- 
faions may be very attached to the People, but they are 
still fonder of their Purdey; winding red-tape is nothing 
to spinning a twenty-pound salmon. Well! they are much 
more harmlessly employed in the heather than in the cab- 
inet; they had better have a drive of deer than an em- 
broglio of nations.” 

“ Philanthropically I agree with you; personally I can’t, 
for few things would give me such individual pleasure as 
being ordered off to the Crimea. I envy all those fellows 
who are gone or going ; but we have lost our chef without 
the war. You know, of course, that Sabretasche has taken 
himself off just as the season opens?” 

“ He is gone to the south of France, is he not ?” 

How calm her voice, how impassive her eyes! Oh, 
society, society, how you teach us to let the wolf gnaw 
our vitals without say or sign I 

“I can’t imagine what took him there, can you ?’^ 

Self-possessed she was, but her cheeks flushed. They 
were very pale when I met her. 

“For his health, I understood. Will he — do you know” 
(she hesitated) — “is he likely to be away long?” 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


357 


“ Some little time, I fancy. I am sorry be is gone ; there 
is no man, except De Yigne, I like better, and he will be 
very much missed ; he is so feted and admired and sought. 
Just when all town is talking of that miraculous work of 
art, that Francesca of his, he chooses to leave. He is an 
enigmatical fellow.” 

Her face was very pale again now, and her eyes were 
not impassive, do what she would. She struck her chest- 
nut sharply, and got some paces before me. 

“We go so slowly, let us gallop back to papa.” 

“Did'Yy Molyneux refuse Sabretasche,” said Monck- 
ton, as she rode out by Apsley House with her father and 
mother, “that he went off like a shot, I wonder?” 

Curly, who heard him, shouted with laughter. “Sabre- 
tasche refused I By Jove, what an idea! No, that’s a grief 
(or a blessing) he’ll never come to. All of ’em go down before 
him, married, widowed, and single. Refused I By George, 
I wish he heard you 1 No, it’s more probable that he has 
made Yiolet desperate after him, (and that she is it’s pretty 
easy to see,) and is gone off for fear Jockey Jack should 
ask him his intentions; for Sabretasche, I am very sure, 
would think no woman worth the trouble of marrying, and 
quite right, too 1” 

Whatever his motive, the Colonel was gone to that 
golden land the south of France, where the foamy Rhone 
speeds on her course, and Marseilles lies by the free blue 
sea, and the Pic du Midi rears its stately head over the 
purple vineyards of France and the green sierras of Spain. 
The Colonel was gone, and all the dabs, and drawing- 
rooms, and journals were speaking of his Francesca; 
speaking, for once, unanimously in admiration for the per- 
fect and wonderful union of art and truth. The Francesca 
was the theme of the day in artistic circles, its masterly 
conception and unexceptionable handling would from any 


35S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


pencil have gained it fame ; in fashionable circles it anly 
needed the well-known name of Vivian Sabretasch^ to 
give it at once an interest and a brevet of value. The 
Framiesca was talked of by everybody, and not talked of 
much less was the fact that the first day of its exhibition 
Sabretasche had presented it to Viscount Molyneux, per- 
haps the man in all tovv^n least calculated to appreciate 
either the art or the gift. Strangely enough, the picture 
most appreciated in another line by the papers and the 
virtuosi, was the Little Tressillian’s water-color, which, 
with its subject, its treatment, and the exceedingly beauti- 
ful and truthful rendering of the boy’s face, attracted more 
attention than any woman’s picture had done for a long 
time ; the art reviews were almost unanimous in its praise ; 
certain faults were pointed dut — reviewers must always 
find some as a sort of brevet of their own discernment — 
but for all that, Alma’s first picture was a very decided 
success, and would have been thought a still more wonder- 
ful one if they had known that the artist was a girl of 
eighteen, whose sole instruction had been a few lessons in 
the studio of an Italian artist. 

Not long after the exhibition, De Yigne, one morning 
after early parade, after breakfasting, having a quiet smoke, 
and reading the papers, rang the bell, ordered his horse 
round, put some of the journals in his coat-pocket, and 
rode toward Richmond, with the double purpose of hav- 
ing a cool morning gallop before the — as he ungratefully 
termed it — bother of the day commenced, and of seeing 
Alma, which he had not done since the success of her 
picture. He was not long doing the seven miles to the 
little farm. He always rode fast ; I believe it would have 
been as great a misery to him to be obliged to do a thing 
slowly as it would have been to Sabretasche to do it 
quickly I He enjoyed the fresh May morning, the sweet 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


35U 


scent of the budding trees, the free, pure air of early 
spring which gave him something of the elasticity cf his 
earlier years. His nature was naturally a very happy one; 
his character was too strong, vigorous, and impatient to 
allow melancholy to become habitual to him; he was too 
young for his fate, however it preyed upon his pride, to 
be constantly before him ; his wife was, indeed, a bitter 
memory to him, but she was hut a memory to him now 
and a man imperceptibly forgets what is never recalled to 
him. Except occasional deep fits of gloom and an un- 
varying cynical sarcasm, De Yigne had cured himself of 
the utter despondency into which his marriage had first 
thrown him; the pace at which he lived, if the pleasures 
were stale, was such as does not leave a man much time for 
thought, and now, as he rode along, with no sound on his 
ear except the merry ring of his horse’s hoofs on the hard 
road, some of his naturally bright spirits came back to him, 
as they generally do, by-the-way, with riding to a man as 
passionately fond of it as he. 

“At home, of course?” he said to Mrs. Lee, as she 
opened the door to him — said it with that careless hauteur 
which was the result of habit, not of intention. De Yigne 
was very republican in his theories, but the patrician came 
out in him malgre lui; it is all very well to talk of equality, 
but I never knew a man yet with the sang pur in him who 
did not instinctively feel the difference between it and the 
mud of the gutters, and show that he felt it too, however 
grand his theorizing the other way. 

“Yes, sir,” said the old nurse, giving him her lowest 
curtesy, and gazing on him with admiring eyes, for, as she 
used to say, she “hadn’t lived among the gentlefolk without 
knowing a real gentleman when she saw one,” “Miss 
Alma’s at home. Where should she be, poor little lady, 
with not a soul to take her out anywhere, and tell her not 


SCO 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to spoil her eyes over them nasty paintings? Yes, sir, 
she’s at home, and tliere’s a young gentleman a calling on 
her. I’m glad of it ; she wants somebody to talk to bad 
enough. ’Tain’t right, you know, sir, for a merry child 
like that to be cooped up alone ; you might as well put a 
bird in a cage and tie its beak up, so that it couldn’t sing! 
It’s that young gentleman as came with you, sir, the other 
day.” 

De Yigne stroked his moustaches and smiled. 

“Oh, ho I Master Curly’s found his way, has he? I 
thought it would be odd if those longs yeux bleus didn’t do 
some damage in their proper sphere. I dare say she’ll be a 
confounded little flirt, like all the rest of them, when she has 
the opportunity,” was his reflection, more natural than 
complimentary, as he opened the door of Alma’s room, 
where the little lady was sitting, as usual, in the window, 
among the birds and flowers De Yigne had sent her; and 
Curly, handsome dog that he was, graceful as a young 
Greek — fit ideal for Alcibiades or Catullus while they were 
in their twenties, their Falernian yet full of flavor, and 
their rose wreaths still with the morning dew upon them — 
lying back in a chaise longue, talking to her quite as softly 
and far more interestedly than he was wont to talk to the 
beauties in his mother’s drawing-room. 

But Alma cut him short in the middle of a sentence, as 
she turned her head at the opening of the door and sprang 
up joyously at the sight of De Yigne. 

“How glad I am I I have been wanting to see you so 
all this week. The days are so long, always looking for 
you and never seeing you; but how good you are to come 
so early.” 

“Not good at all. I was not in bed till six this morn- 
ing, and liked an early ride ; the air is beautiful to-day, 
one only wants to be fishing in a mountain burn to enjoy it 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


3Gl 

iHoroughly. Hallo, Curly I’’ said De Yigne, throwing hira- 
selt into an arm-chair; “how are you? How did you 
manage to get up so early? I thought you never were up 
till aftei one, except on Derby Day ?’’ 

“Or other temptation greater still,’’ said Curly, with an 
eloquent glance of his long violet eyes at Alma. 

“Do you mean that for a compliment to me?” said the 
Little Tressillian, with that gay, rebellious, moqueur air 
which was so pretty in her. “In the first place, I do not 
believe it, for there is no woman on the face of the earth 
who could attempt to rival a horse ; and in the second, I 
should not thank you for it if I did, for compliments are 
only fit for empty heads to feed on.” 

“Meaning, you think yours the very reverse of empty?” 
said De Vigne, quietly. 

“ Certainly, it is not empty. I am not a boarding-school 
girl, monsieur,” said Alma, indignantly. “I have filled it 
with what food I can get for it, and I know at least enough 
to feel that I know nothing — the first step to wisdom the 
sages say.’^ 

“But if you dislike compliments /ou might at least 
accept homage,” said Curly, smiling. 

“ Homage ? Oh I yes, as much as you like. I should 
like to be worshiped by the world, and petted by a few.” 

“I dare say you would,” said De Yigne, stroking her 
little black kitten, elaborately decorated by Alma in a 
collar of blue ribbon and gold beads. “ I can’t say your 
desires are characterized by great modesty.” 

“Well, I speak the truth,” said Alma, naively. “A 
great deal of women’s modest speeches are great false- 
hoods, on whose telling, however, society smiles as ‘the 
thing.’ I should like to be admired by the thousands, 
and loved just by one or two.” 

“You have only to be seen to have your first wish,” said 
31 


VOL. I. 


3C2 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Curly, softly, “and only to be known to have much more 
than your second.” 

Alma turned away impatiently ; she had a sad Knack of 
showing when she was annoyed. 

“Really you are intolerable. Captain Brandling. You 
spoil conversation utterly. I say those things because I 
mean them, not to make you flatter me. I shall talk only 
to Sir Folko, to Major De Yigne, for he alone understands 
me, and answers me properly.” 

With which lecture to Curly the little lady twisted her 
low chair nearer to De Yigne, and looked up in his face, 
very much as spaniels look up in their masters^ liking a 
kick from them better than a caress from a stranger. 

Curly, sweet-tempered though he was, was a trifle irritated 
— he was so used to having it all his own way — a very care- 
lessly conquering, lazy Young-England way, too — and waa 
a little astonished at being so summarily put aside by this 
little Tressillian, whom he had come to see chiefly for the 
sake of her bright-blue eyes — partly because she had 
puzzled him, partly (pardon, mademoiselle! — the best of 
us will think so of the best of you till we have tried you) 
because he thought he could say what he liked to her, 
frank, free, a,nd unprotected as she was, and partly because 
he wanted to see how De Yigne really stood with her ; a 
problem he did not make out any clearer now, for though 
Alma was certainly very fond of him, she was much too 
candid about it, Curly reasoned, for anything like love; 
and De Yigne’s calm, amused, quizzical, yet guardian-like 
manner over her was still further removed by many miles 
from the grande passion. 

But Curly was very sweet-tempered, and in a second he 
was all right again. 

“You are cruelly unjust. Miss Tressillian,” he said, play- 
fully. “/ was telling the truth — a thing you seem greatly 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


363 


to patronize — and you shut me up as abruptly as if I were 
committing a crime. You see it was impossible for me to 
know your tastes. De Vigne has an immense advantage 
over me in having known you before I did.” 

Alma’s eloquent eyes looked as if she thought De Yigne 
had immense advantages over him in many other respects, 
but she was too much of a lady to say so of course. She 
made him a pretty careless bow, as if she was tired of the 
subject, and turned to De Yigne : 

“Have you seen Miss Molyneux lately?” She was 
rather jealous of Miss Molyneux, having ridden oflf on an 
idea that De Yigne saw a great deal of Yiolet and admired 
her exceedingly. 

“Yes; and not long ago I heard Miss Molyneux envy- 
ing you !” 

“Mel Whatever for? I envy her, if you like I” cried 
Alma, brushing up the kitten’s hair becomingly. “How 
does she know me ? What has she heard about me ? Who 
has told her anything of me ?” 

“Gently, gently, de grdce !” cried De Yigne. “I don’t 
know that she has heard anything of you, or that anybody 
has told her anything about you ; but she has seen some- 
thing of yours, and admired it exceedingly.” 

“My picture?” asked Alma, breathlessly. 

“Your picture; and she said that whoever the artist 
might be who had painted the lovely face of the boy, she 
envied her, and wished that she could change places with 
her.” 

“ She would not if she knew,” said Alma, with that deep 
sadness which just now and then welled out of her gay, sun- 
shiny nature, as if in evidence of what the passionate, and 
generous, and tender character would suffer when she came 
to the grief De Yigne had prophesied for her. 

“Did she go to the exhibition with you, then?” 


364 


GRANVILLE BE YIGNE. 


“Yes; or rather, I went with her.” 

“ How I hate her I” said Alma, with sufficient vehemence, 
tearing a bit of drawing-paper into strips. 

“Et pourquoi?” asked De Yigne, in surprise. 

“Because you are always with her, and she is in your 
circle, and you go about with her, and admire her, and I 
am shut up here ; I must wait till you choose to come and 

see me, and I have no society to shine in, and Oh I I 

hate her I” cried Alma, energetically. I dare say she could 
have hated, not rancorously, but very hotly while it lasted, 
as most people can who love hotly also. 

De Yigne laughed; he was used to Alma’s enthusiastic 
expressions, and set them down to her Southern blood, 
attaching no importance to them. 

“Amiable, I must say. Miss Tressillian, and not very 
grateful ; for Yiolet Molyneux is prepared to be devoted 
to you, if she could know you, for having painted that 
exquisite picture, as she thinks it.” 

“Ah ! my picture I” cried Alma, joyously, her hate and 
her wrongs passing away like summer shadows off a sunny 
landscape. “What has been said about it? Has it been 
liked? Who has seen it? Do the papers mention it? 
Have the ” 

“One question at a time, please, then perhaps I may 
contrive to answer them,” said De Yigne, smiling; “though, 
the best answer to them all will be for you to read these. 
Here, see how you like that I” 

He took a critique by a well-known Art-critic out of his 
pocket, and gave it to her, pointing out, among many con- 
demnatory notices of other works, the few brief laudatory 
words in praise of her own, worth more than whole pages 
of warmer laudation but less discriminating criticism. 

“How delightful ! how glad I am I Oh, this is beautiful * 
^this is something like the realization of my dreams!” 


GRANVILi-E DE TIGNE. 


36& 


cried Alma, rapturously, her eyes beaming, and her whole 
face in a rose flush of ecstatic delight. 

“Wait a minute ; reserve your raptures,’’ said De Yigne, 
putting the Times, the Atlas, and other papers before her. 
“ If the first review sends you into such a state of exulta- 
tion, we shall lose sight of you altogether over these.” 

“Oh, they make me so happy!” exclaimed Alma, when 
she had read them, with none of the dignity and tranquil 
pride becoming to a successful artist, but with a wild, glee- 
ful, triumphant delight most amusing, De Yigne told me, 
to behold. “You won’t quite forget me for Miss Moly- 
neux now; she hasn’t her name in the papers, has she? 
I am so delighted ! I used to think my pictures would be 
liked if people saw them ; but I never hoped they would 
be admired like this; and the beauty of it is, that it is all 
owing to you; without you I should never have had it!” 

“Indeed you would, though. I have done nothing. 
Your picture was clever; it has been seen, and has had 
its due appreciation, as all clever things have, sooner or 
later. You have nothing to thank me for, I can assure 
you.” 

“I have !” repeated Alma, resolutely. “You knew how 
I could exhibit it ; you did it all for me ; but for you my 
picture would now be hanging here, unnoticed and un- 
praised. You were the first person who admired it, and 
you know well enough that your few words are of more 
value to me than all these !” With which Alma tossed 
over the table, with contemptuous energy, the reviews 
which had charmed her so intensely a minute or two 
before. 

“Yery unwise,” said De Yigne, dryly. “These will 
make your fame and your money; my words can do you 
no good whatever.” 

31 * 


/ 


668 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


'‘They do me the best good,” said Alma, indignantly. 
“Do you ’suppose if you did not like my pictures, that 1 
should care for anybody else’s praise ?” 

“I should say so; I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” said 
De Vigne. He took a most malicious pleasure in teasing 
her, in making her eyes grow dark and flash, and the color 
come into her cheeks in her vehement and demonstrative 
vexation. 

She didn’t vouchsafe him any words now, though, but 
twisted herself away from him with one of her rapid, un- 
English movements. 

“How courteous he is! You are very forbearing. Miss 
Tressillian, to put up with him I” said Curly, who had been 
listening, half amusedly, half irritably, to this conversation, 
which excluded him. 

Alma was angry with De Yigne herself, but she was not 
going to let any one else be so too. 

“ Forbearing ? What do you mean ? I should be very 
ungrateful if I were not thankful for such a friend.” 

“Now that is too bad,” said Curly, plaintively. “I, 
who really admire your most marvelous talent, only get 
tabooed for being a flatterer, while he is thought perfec- 
tion, and pleases by being most abominably rude.” 

“You had better not measure yourself with him. Captain 
Brandling,” said Alma, with that mischievous impudence 
which sat well upon her, though no other woman, I believe, 
?ould have had it with such impunity. 

“Vous me piquez, mademoiselle,” said Curly, a great 
deal too sweet a disposition to be annoyed by pre-emi- 
nence given to another, especially to De Yigne, for whom 
he retained some of the old feeling of Frestonhills vassal- 
age, yet sufficiently taken with the fascinating Little Tres- 
«iliian to be vexed not to be higher in her good graces. 
“You will tempt me by your very prohibition to enter the 


GBANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


367 


MBiik (vith him. I should not care to dispute the belt with 
him >a most things, but for such a prize ’’ 

“What nonsense are you talking, Curly,” said De Tigne, 
with that certain chill hauteur now so customary to him, 
but which Alma had never yet seen in him. “A prize to 
be fought for must be disputed. Don’t bring hot-pressed 
compliments here to spoil the atmosphere.” 

“That’s right, take my part,” interrupted Alma, not 
understanding his speech as Curly understood it. “You 
see, Captain Brandling, that sort of high-flown flattery is 
no compliment; if the man mean it, it says little for his 
intellect, for we are none of us angels without wings, as 
you call us; and if he do not mean it, it says little for 
ours, for it is easy to tell when a man is really liking or 
only laughing at us.” 

“Indeed !” said Curly. “I wish we were as clear when 
ladies were liking or laughing at us; it would save us a 
good many disappointments, when enchanting forms of life 
and light, who have softly murmured tenderest words when 
they stole our hearts away in tulle illusion at a hunt ball, 
bow to us as chillily as to a first introduction when we meet 
them afterward en Amazone in the Ride, with old Lord 
Adolphus Fitzpoodle, as rich as he is gouty, on their off- 
side.” 

“ Serve you right for being so credulous,” said De 
Yigne, tickling the kitten with the end of his riding- 
whip. “Women are either actresses or fools; if they 
are amiable they are stupid, and if they are clever they 
are artful.” 

“Like Thackeray’s heroines,” suggested Curly. 

“Exactly; shows how well the man knows life as it is, 
not as it should be, for I always hold that the wiser the 
mind the better ought to be the heart. But the first thing 
the world teaches a clever woman is to banish her feelings. 


368 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Women may thrive on talent, they are certain to go to rack 
and ruin on feeling ; few enough of them have any, and a 
good thing for them, too.” 

“I don’t agree with you,” said Alma, looking up, ready 
for a combat. 

“Don’t you, petite?” laughed De Yigne. “I think you 
will when you have a few more years over your head, and 
have seen the world a little.” 

“No, I do not agree with you,” returned the Little 
Tressillian, decidedly, “that life’s first lesson is to crush 
down your feelings both to men and women. I believe 
that in proportion as you feel so do you suffer ; but I deny 
that all talented women are actresses. Where will you go 
for all your noblest actions but to women of intellect and 
mind ? Sappho’s heart inspired the genius which has come 
down to us through such lengthened ages. Was it not 
heart which has immortalized Heloise ? Was it not in- 
tellect, joined to their passionate love for their country, 
which have placed the deeds of Polycrita, Hortensia, Her- 
sillia. Mademoiselle de la Rochefoucauld among the records 
of patriotism? One of the fondest loves we have heard of 
was the love of Vittoria Colonna for Pescara, of the woman 
who ranks only second to Petrarch, the friend of Cardinal 
Pope, and Bembo, and Catarini, the adored of Michael 
Angelo, the admired of Ariosto I Oh, you are very wrong; 
where you find the glowing imagination, there, too, will you 
find as ardent affections ; where there is expansive intellect, 
there, and there only, will be charity, tolerance, clear per- 
ception, just discrimination ; with a large brain, a large 
heart, the more cultured the intelligence, the more sensi- 
tive the susceptibilities. Lucy Edgermond would make 
your tea for you tolerably, and head your table respect- 
ably, and blush where she ought, and say Yes and No like 
a well-bred woman, but iu Corinne alone will you find pas* 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


369 


Bion to beat with your own, intellect to match with your 
own, sympathy, comprehension, elevation, all that a woman 
should give to the man she loves !” 

A Corinne in her own way I can fancy she looked, too, 
with her blue eyes scintillating like two stars in her earnest- 
ness, all her own intelligence and talent stamped on her 
high-arched brow and on her mobile lips; her little silver- 
toned voice rising and falling in impassioned vehemence, 
accompanied with her vivacious and unconscious gesticula- 
tion, a trick, probably, of her foreign blood. Curly listened 
to her with amazement and delight, this was something 
quite new to him ; it was not so new to De Yigne, but it 
touched him with something deeper, more like regret than 
amusement. A glimpse of the golden land is great pain 
when we know the door is locked and the key irrevocably 
lost. It brought over him again his old sarcasm and gloom. 

“Do you suppose, petite,” he said, with a bitter smile, 
“that if there were Corinnes in the land men would be 
such fools as to go and take the Lucys of modern society 
in their stead ? Heaven knows, if there were women like 
what you describe, we might be better men ; more earnest 
in our lives, more faithful in our loves. But you draw 
from the ideal, I from the real, two altitudes very far wide 
apart — as far apart, my child, as dawn and midnight.” 

His tone checked and saddened Alma’s bright and en- 
thusiastic but very impressionable nature. She gave a 
deep, heavy sigh. 

“ It is midnight with you, I am afraid, and I do so want 
it to be noon. I wish you would believe in me, at least.” 

He answered with a laugh, not a real one. 

“Too much to promise; I will believe in you as soon as 
I do in anybody; and as for its being midnight with me, 
, if it is, it is like midnight at a bal d’Opera, with plenty of 
gaslights, transparencies, music, and amusement enough 

y 


3T0 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to send the sun jealous, and making believe the day haa 
dawned.” 

“But, then, don’t the gaslights, and transparencies, and 
all the rest of your bal d’Opera look tawdry and garish 
when the day is really up and on them ?” 

“We never let the daylight in,” laughed De Yigne; 

“ and won’t remember that we ever had any brighter light 
than our colored lamps. Why should w'e ? They do well 
enough for all intents and purposes.” 

Alma shook her head : 

“They won’t content you always.” 

“Oh yes they will; I have no desires now but to live 
without worry, and die in some good hard fight in harness, 
like my father.” 

Alma struck him on the arm with his own riding switch, 
which she had taken from him to play with the kitten. 

“You are naughty and cruel ; you say that only to vex 
me. Do you suppose at thirty-five that you have done 
with life ?” 

“Done with life! Certainly not, unless I come to a 
violent death, as most of my ancestors have done before 
me. No, my health and my strength are perfect, thank 
Heaven, notwithstanding I have done my best to impair 
them ; but I have excluded passions, desires, and impulses 
out of my life — they cost me a vast deal too dear.” 

Alma looked at him incredulously, with her eyebrows 
raised. 

“I should have thought you too clever a man of the 
world to talk such folly,” said the little lady, impatiently. 
“In all the vigor, strength, and glory of early manhood, 
do you suppose it possible for you to ice yourself into a 
deliberate lifeless stoicism closing round you, as its stony 
Rome shuts in the lily-encrimite? You may fancy your* 
nature is chilled forever, (though why it should be T cannot 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


371 


imagine,) but be very sure it will rouse itself sooner or 
later.” " 

“I hope not, that^s all I can say,” returned De Yigne; 
“but though you may wake up a sleeping dog, you can’t a 
dead one; don’t you know that, young lady?” 

“But from a dead phoenix there will rise a new one,” 

“A phoenix! an unreal thing, a poetic myth I You 
choose your metaphor badly for your theory, like all these 
enthusiasts. Curly, eh ? Pin them to fact, they are undone 
in a moment. What! are you going? I’ll come with you 
— that is, if you are going back to town.” 

“Yes I am,” said Curly. “I’m going to a confounded 
dejeuner in Palace Gardens, that little flirt’s, Jerry Mab, I 
beg her pardon, the Honorable Geraldine Maberly. I 
shall barely get back in time; it’s one o’clock, I vow. 
IIow time slips in some places ! If I promise to leave 
compliments, i.e. in your case, truth, behind me, may I not 
come again? Pray be merciful, and allow me.” 

“How can I prevent you?” said Alma, in a laughing 
unconsciousness of Curly’s meaning glances. “Certainly, 
come if you like ; it is kind of you to think of it, for I 
am very dull here all alone. I am no philosopher, you 
know, and cannot make a virtue of necessity, and pretend 
to take my tub and cabbage-leaves in preference to a 
causeuse and delicate mayonnaise.” 

“Capricious, like all your sex. You are asking for 
compliments now, Alma. On ne loue d’ordinaire que pour 
etre loue,” said De Yigne, dryly. 

“Am I? I did not mean it so,” answered the girl, 
innocently. 

“Nor did I take it so,” said Curly, bending toward her 
as he took her hand ; “so I shall not try to say how much 
I thank you for your permission, but only avail myself of 
it as often as I can, for the kindness will certainly bo 

to me.” 


372 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


De Yigne stood looking disdainfully on, stroking his 
moustaches, and thinking, I dare say, what arrant flirts all 
women were at heart, and what fools men were to pander 
to their vanities. 

He bid her good morning with that careless hauteur 
which he had often with everybody else but very rarely 
with the Little Tressillian. Curly’s horse was at the door, 
but his groom had ridden farther down the road with Do 
Vigne’s. While he stood at the door waiting for it, he 
heard Alma’s voice : 

“ Come back a minute.” 

He went back, as in courtesy bound, 

“Did you want me?” 

“Yes. Why did you speak so crossly to me?” 

“I, crossly! I was not aware of it.” 

“But I was, and it was not kind of you. Sir Folko.” 

“Why will you persist in calling me like that knight 
sans peur et sans reproche ?” said De Yigne, impatiently. 
“I tell you I have nothing in common with him — with his 
pure life and his spotless shield. He did no evil; I do — 
Heaven knows how much ! He surmounted his tempta- 
tions ; I have always succumbed to mine. Ho had a con- 
science at ease; mine, if it were a tender one, might be as 
great a torture as the rack. His past was one of wise 
thoughts and noble deeds ; mine can show nedher the one 
nor the other.” 

“Of your life you know best; but in your character I 
choose to see the resemblance, if you choose to see the 
difference, between you and Montfau9on,” replied Alma, 
always resolute to her own opinion. “Was he not a man 
of experience, a man who feared nothing, who was fierce 
to his foes and generous to those who trusted him ? As 
for his past, he had probably drawn experience from error, 
as men ever do, and learnt wisdoiri out of folly. And as 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


3T3 


for his stainless shield, is not your haughty De Yigne crest 
as unsullied as when it passed to you ?” 

“No,” said De Yigne, fiercely. “My folly stained it, 
and the stain is the curse of my life. Child, why did you 
speak of such things? If you care for my friendship, you 
must never speak to me of my past.” 

His face was stern, his dark eyes stormy, and full of the 
gloom and remorseless pride her words had suddenly awak- 
ened — deadly memories were stirring up in him. Most 
women might have been afraid of him in his haughty 
anger. She was not. She looked up at him, bewildered, 
it is true, but with a strange mingling of girlish tenderness 
and woman’s passion, both unconscious of themselves. 

“Oh, I will not I Do forgive me. You know I would 
never willingly say anything to anger you. You do believe 
me, don’t you ?” 

“Yes, yes, I believe you,” said De Yigne, hastily. 
“Don’t exalt me into a god, Alma, that’s all, for I am 
very mortal. Good-by, petite I” 

He laid his hand on her shoulder with the familiar kind- 
ness he had imperceptibly grown into with her, natural to 
his earlier nature, but very exceptional with his present 
one; he could hardly look into the clear brilliance of her 
dark-blue eyes and doubt her — doubt, at least, that she 
now meant what she said, whether or no she would keep 
to it. 

In another second he was across his horse’s back, and 
riding out of the court-yard with Curly, while Alma stood 
in the doorway looking after him, shading her eyes from 
the May sun, which touched up her golden hair and her 
picturesque bright-hued dress into a brilliant tableau, 
under the low, dark, brown porch of her cottage home. 

Curly rode on quietly for some little way, busying his 
mind with rolling the leaves round a Manilla, and lighting 

32 


VOL. I. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


S’? 4 

it en route, while De Vigne puffed away at a giant Ha- 
vana, between regulating which and keeping his fidgety 
Grey Derby quiet, (he usually rode horses that would have 
thrown any other man but him or M. Rarey,) he had little 
leisure for road-side conversation. 

At last Curly broke silence, twisting his long blonde 
moustaches with a puzzled smile, and flicking his mare’s 
ears thoughtfully with his whip. 

“Well, De Yigne ! I don’t know what to make of it !” 

“Don’t know what to make of what?” demanded De 
Vigne, curtly. 

He was a little impatient with his Frestonhills pet. One 
may not care two straws for pheasant-shooting — nay, one 
may even have sprained one’s arm, so that it is a physical 
impossibility to lift an Enfield to one’s shoulder — and yet 
so dog-in-mangerish is human nature that one could kick 
a fellow who ventures to come in and touch a head of our 
defendu or uncared-for game. 

“Of that little thing,” returned Curly, musingly. “I 
don’t understand her.” 

“Very possibly.” 

“Why very possibly? I know a good deal of women, 
good, bad, and indifferent, but I’ll be hanged if I can un- 
derstand that Little Tressillian. She’s so different, some- 
how, to all the rest of ’em. She has so much sense in her, 
and yet she is full of life and nonsense. She can touch 
on all sorts of queer subjects, and speak about a man’s life 
without a trace of boldness. She is so frank and free one 
might take no end of advantage of her; and yet, somehow, 
deuce take it, one can'’t. The girl’s truth and fearlessness 
are more protection to her than other women’s pruderies 
and chevaux-de-frise.” 

De Vigne did not answer, but smoked his Havana 
silently; probably because he thought with Curly, but was 
not going to say so. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


375 


“She is a little darling,” resumed Curly, meaitatively. 
“That’s the sort of girl I’ve dreamed about, De Yigne, 
One feels a better fellow with her — eh ?” 

“ Can’t say,” replied De Vigne. “ I have generally looked 
on young ladies, for inflammable boys like you, as danger- 
ous stimulants rather than as calming tonics.” 

“Confound your matter-of-fact,” swore Curly. “You 
may laugh at it if you like, but I mean it. She makes me 
think of things that one pooh-poohs and forgets in the 
bustle of the world. She’s a vast lot too good to be shut 
up in that brown old house, with only a kitten to play with, 
and an old nurse to take care of her.” 

“ She seems to have made an impression on you I” said 
De Vigne, dryly. 

“Certainly she has I” said Curly, gayly. “And, ’pon 
my life, what makes still more impression on me, De Vigne, 
is, that you and I, two as wild fellows as ever lived, and 
pretty well as unscrupulous in that line, I should say, as 
that much-abused chap, Don Juan, should be going calling 
on that little thing, and chatting with her as harmlessly as 
if she ,were our sister, when we ought to be making des- 
perate love to her, if she hadn’t such confounded dear 
trusting eyes of hers that they make one ashamed of one’s 
own thoughts. ’Pon my life, it’s very extraordinary I” 

“If extraordinary, it is only a man’s honor,” said De 
Vigne, with his coldest hauteur, “toward a young, guile- 
less girl, utterly unprotected, save by her own defenseless- 
ness — the best protection to any right-feeling man. For 
my own part, as a ‘married man,’ (how cold his sneer 
always grew at those words !) I have no right to ‘enter the 
lists’ with you, as you poetically phrased it to-day, even 
supposing my experiences of passion did not make me, as 
they do, renounce all sueh affairs, with no merit in the 
renunciation ; and for yourself, you are too true a gentle- 


a76 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


man, Curly, though it is ‘ our way ’ to be unscrupulous in 
such matters, to take unfair advantage of my introduction 
of you to a girl who is a lady, and deserves to be treated 
as such, though she has not the entourages of wealth and 
position to command respect; and, indeed, if you did, I, 
to whom Mr. Tressillian appealed for what slight assistance 
I have it in my power to afford her, should hold myself 
responsible for having made you known to her, and should 
be bound to take the insult as to myself.” 

Curly, at the beginning of De Yigne’s very calm, but 
very grandiose speech, opened his lazy violet eyes, and 
stared at him; but as he went on, all Curly’s warmer feel- 
ings, and all the native delicacy and generosity that lay at 
the heart of this young “Adonis of the Guards,” too deep 
for his life to score them out, roused up, and he turned to 
his old Frestonhills hero with his smile, so young in its 
brightness : 

“Quite right, De Yigne. You are a brick; and if 1 do 
any harm to that dear Little Tressillian, I give you free 
leave to shoot me dead like a dog, and should richly de- 
serve it, too. But go and see her I must, for she is worth 
all the women we shall meet at Jerry’s to-day, though they 
do count themselves the creme de la creme.” 

“ The creme de la creme can be, at the best, only skim,’* 
said De A^'igne, with his ready fling of sarcasm; “but I am 
not going to the Maberlys’, thank you. Early strawberries 
and late on dits are both flavorless to my taste; the fault 
of my own palate, perhaps. 1 shall go and lunch at the 
TJ. S., and play a game or two at pool. How much better 
I should like billiards, if one could progress; but after the 
first year or two a man has reached his perfection in it, and 
then he stands still till his eyes and arms fail him. How 
pleasant the wind is I Grey Derby wants a gallop, let’s 
give him his way.” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


377 


Palamon and Arcite were not truer or warmer friends 
than De V^igne and Curly ; but, when a woman’s face 
dazzled the eyes of both, the death-blow was struck to 
friendship, and the seeds of feud were sown. 


PART THE THIRTEENTH. 

I. 


HOW VIVIAN SABRETASCHE BURIED HIS PAST AND AWOKE 
TO A GOLDEN PRESENT. 

On the 12th of May Leila Countess of Puifdoflf gave a 
ball, concert, and sort of moonlight fete, all three in one, 
at her charming dower-house at Twickenham. All our set 
went pretty nearly, and all the men of Ours, of course, for 
le feu Putfdolf had been in the Dashers, and out of a tender 
memory of him, his young widow made enfans de la maison 
of all the corps; not, one is sure, because Ours was one of 
the crackest troops in the service, and we were counted the 
handsomest set of men in all Arms, but out of pure love 
and respect for our late gouty colonel, who, Georges 
Dandin in life, became a Mausolus when under the sod. 
Who upholds that the good is oft interred with our bones? 
Ce n’est pas vrai, though it is Shakspeare who says it; if 
you leave your family, or your pet hospital a good many 
thousands, you will get the cardinal virtues, and a trifle 
more, in letters of gold on your tomb; if you have lived 
up to your income, or forgotten to insure, any penny-a- 
lining La Monnoye will do to scribble your epitaph, and 
break off with “C’est trop mentir pour cinq ecus!” Le 
fer Puffdoff became "mon mari adore” as soon as the 

32 * 


378 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


^rave closed over him; poor cause — “ mon mari adore 
nad left his handsome countess most admirably well off, 
and with some of this “last bequest” the little widow 
gave us a charming fete on this 12th of May. Such 
things are all so much alike, that, going to one, you ordi- 
narily have gone to all, but this was certainly better than 
most. The Puflfdofif wines were par excellence; the Puif- 
doff taste admirable; Grisi and Mario, and a number of 
lesser stars sang a ravir; Violet Molyneux and a number 
of lesser belles waltzed to perfection ; there were as lovely 
women and as exquisite toilettes as you could wish to see; 
and there were the fairy-like grounds glistening in the 
moonlight, with myriad lamps gleaming like diamond 
clusters among the darkness, and the winter-garden, 
where, under glass, nature in the tropics was counter- 
feited so inimitably with fragrant imitations of the rose 
gardens of the East, the orange groves of southern 
.Europe, and the luxuriant vegetation of the West 
Indies. 

It looked like fairyland, I admit, with its brilliant color- 
ing, its heavy perfumes, its beautiful music. Not Anacreon 
or Aristippus, Boccaccio or Moore, need have imagined 
anything more charming to look at — it was only a pity 
that the people were not Arcadians to enjoy it; that there 
vere such plots and counterplots and fermentations under 
that smooth surface ; such heart-burnings, jealousies, and 
manoeuvres among those soft smiling beauties ; such under- 
currents of bitterness and ill-nature under the pleasant 
sunny ripples of social life. What a sad trick one catches 
of looking under everything ; it spoils pleasure, for nothing 
will stand it ; but when once one has been sick through 
chromate of lead, one can’t believe in Bath-buns, try how 
one may I I went to the ball late ; De Vigne, much to the 
Puffdoff’s chagrin, chose instead to go to a card party at 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


379 


Wyndham’s, where play was certain to be high. Ue pre- 
ferred men’s society to women’s at all times, and I must 
say I think he showed his judgment ! The first person I 
saw was Violet, on Curly’s arm, with whom she had been 
waltzing. Brilliant and lovely she looked, with all her 
high-bred grace and finish about her; but she had lost her 
color, there was an absence of all that free spontaneous 
gayety, and there was a certain distraction in her eyes, 
which made me guess the Colonel’s abrupt departure had 
not been without its effect upon our most radiant beauty. 
She had promised me the sixth dance the previous day in 
the Park, and, as I waltzed with her, pour m’amuser I 
mentioned Sabretasche’s name casually, when, despite all 
her sang-froid, a slight flush in her cheeks showed she did 
not hear it with indifference. When I resigned her to 
Regalia, (Violet danced as untiringly as a Willis, and the 
little Duke’s one accomplishment was his waltzing,) I 
strolled through the rooms with the other beaute regnante 
of the night, Madame la Duchesse de Vieillecour. Good 
Heavens I what relationship was there between that stately, 
'aughty-eyed woman, with her Court atmosphere about her, 
aer calm but finished coquetteries, and bright-faced, blithe- 
voiced Gwen Brandling, who had given me that ring under 
the trees in Kensington Gardens ten years before ? Ah, 
well 1 Time changes us all. The ring was old-fashioned 
now; and Madame and I made love more amusingly and 
more wisely, if less truly than earnestly, than in those old 
silly days when we were in love, before I had learned ex- 
perience and she had taken up prudence and ducal quarter- 
ings. I was sitting under one of the luxuriant festoons of 
creepers in the winter-garden with her excellency ; reveng- 
ing, perhaps a little more naturally than rightly, on Madame 
de Vieillecour the desertion of Gwen Brandling, (you see, 
I had lOved and lost the latter; I didn’t care two straws 


380 


CRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


for the former;) and I suppose I was getting a trifle too 
sarcastic in the memories I was recalling to her, for she 
broke off our conversation suddenly, and not with that 
subtle tact which Tuileries air had taught her. 

“Look I Is it possible? Is not that Colonel Sabre- 
tasche ? I thought he was gone to Biarritz for his health:” 

I looked ; it was Sabretasche, to my supreme astonish- 
ment, for his leave had not nearly expired ; and in a letter 
Be Yigne had had from him a day or two previous there 
had been no mention of his intending to return. 

“How charming he is, your Colonel I” said Madame de 
Vieillecour, languidly. “I never met anybody handsomer 
or more witty in all Paris. Bring him here, I want to 
speak to him.” 

“ Surprised to see me, Arthur ?” said Sabretasche, laugh- 
ing, as I went up to him, obedient to her desires. “I 
always told you never to be astonished at anything I do. 
I am as enigmatical, you know, and as erratic as the Wan- 
dering Jew, or the Premier Grenadier du Monde. Madame 
de Vieillecour there ? She does me much honor. Is she 
trying to make you singe your wings again ?” 

He came up to her with me, of course, and stood chat- 
ting some minutes. 

“I am only this moment arrived,” he said, in answer to 
her. “When I reached Park Lane this morning, or rather 
evening, I found Lady Puffdoff’s card of invitation; so I 
dined, dressed, and came off, for I knew I should meet all 
my old friends here. Yes, I am much better, thank you; 
the sweet air of the Pyrenees must always do one good, 
and then they give all the credit to the Biarritz baths I 
Shockingly unjust, but what is just in this world ? How 
odd Biarritz looked, by-the-way, with not a fair face or a 
dyspeptic constitution in it!” 

He stayed chatting some moments, though I noticed hii 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


381. 


eyes glanced impatiently through the rooms in search of 
somebody or other he did not see. The air of the Pyre- 
nees had indeed done him good ; he did not look iike the 
same man; his listless melancholy, which had grown on 
him so much during the last month, had entirely worn off ; 
there was a clear mind-a,t-ease look about him, as if he were 
relieved of some weight that had worn him down, and there 
was a true ring about his voice and laugh which had not 
been there, gay as he was accounted, since I had known 
him, even when he was ten years younger than he was 
now. He soon left Madame de Yieillecour, and lounged 
through the rooms, exchanging a smile, or a bow, or a few 
words with almost every one he met, for Sabretasche had 
a most illimitable acquaintance, and all were delighted to 
see him back; for, without him, things in his set ever 
seemed at a stand-still. 

Yiolet Molyneux was sitting down after her waltz with 
Regalia, leaning back on a couch, fanning herself slowly, 
and attending very little to the crowd of men who had 
gathered, as they were certain to do, round the beauty of 
the season. She generally laughed, and talked, and jested 
with them all, so that her pet friends called her a shocking 
flirt, (though she was in reality no more of one than any 
fascinating woman appears, nolens volens, and was far too 
difficult to please to be a coquette;) but to-night she was 
listless and silent, playing absently with her bouquet, 
though admiring glances enough were bent upon her, and 
delicate flattery enough breathed in her ears, to have roused 
the Sleeping Beauty herself from her trance. 

It required more, however, to rouse Violet to-night; 
that little more she had, in a very soft and musical voice, a 
voice well accustomed to give meaning to such words, that 
whispered, — 


382 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ ilow can I hope I have been remembered, when yon 
have so many to teach you to forget 

She looked up; her violet eyes beamed with such undis- 
guised delight that some of the men smiled, and others 
swore under their moustaches ; her natural wild-rose color 
came back into her cheeks; in a second she was her own 
radiant animated self; she gave him her hand without a 
word, and one of her vassals, a young Viscount, a boy in 
the Rifles, gave up his place beside her to Sabretasche. 
Then she talked to him, quietly enough, on indifferent 
subjects, of Biarritz and Pau, of the Garonne and the Pic- 
du-Midi, of Bigorre and Gavarnie, as if neither remembered 
their last strange interview in the Water-Color Exhibition, 
as if the Francesca were not in both their minds, as if love 
were not lying at the heart and gleaming in the eyes of 
each of them. 

Sabretasche asked her to waltz; she could not, since she 
had only the minute before refused Regalia; but she took 
his arm and strolled into the summer-garden, leaving the 
full rise and swell of the ball-room music, with the subdued 
hum and murmur of Society, in the distance. 

He spoke of trifles ^s they passed the different groups 
that were laughing, chatting, or flirting in the several 
rooms ; but his eyes were on hers, and spoke a more elo- 
quent language. Violet never asked him of his sudden 
return or his abrupt departure. She was too happy to be 
with him again to care through what right or reason she 
was so. Gradually they grew silent, such a silence as is 
often more expressive than speech, as they strolled ou 
through the conservatories till they stood alone among the 
rich tropical and southern vegetation. One side of the 
winter-garden was open to the clear and still May night, 
where the midnight stars shone on the dark old trees and 
the white statues, with their lamps gleaming, diamond-likft; 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


383 


between, while the early nightingales sang to the fair spring 
skies those passionate chants of love and rapture, where- 
with the other tribes of nature, whom we in our arrogance 
dare to call the lower, touch deep to the heart of man, 
respond to all his feverish dreams and all his vague 
desires, and give utterance in their unknown tongue to 
those diviner thoughts, that yearning sadness, which lie 
far down unseen in Human nature. 

The night was still ; there was no sound save the cadence 
of the distant music and the sweet gush of the nightin- 
gales^ songs close by ; the wind of early summer swept 
gently in and fanned their heavy perfumes from the glow- 
ing leaves of tree and flower, till the air was full of that 
dreamy and voluptuous beauty of fragrance which lulls 
the senses and woos the heart to those softer moments 
which, could they but last, would make men never need to 
dream of heaven. Such hours arc rare ; what wonder if 
to win them we risk all, if in them we cry, with the Lotus 
Eaters, 

Let us alone. What is it that will last? 

All things are taken from us and become 
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past. 

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 
To war with evil? Is there any peace 
In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

All things have rest and ripen toward the grave 
In silence; ripen, fall, and cease. 

Give us long rest, or death; dark death or dreamful ease. 

The soft moonlit air trembled with the low sighing of the 
trees and the swell of the nightingale’s note, 

breaking its heart with its strain, 

Waiting breathless to die when its music is ended. 

The rich radiance within gleamed on the crimson glow of 
the gorgeous roses and the silvery white of the magnolias 


884 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and lilies ; the musical fountains fell into their marble 
basins with harmonious cadence ; Sabretasche, in the stili 
beauty of the night, could listen to every breath and hear 
each heart-throb of the woman he loved, as be looked into 
her face with all its delicate and impassioned beauty — the 
beauty of the Francesca. All the passion that was in him 
stirred and trembled at it ; the voluptuous sweetness of 
the hour chimed delicious music with his thoughts and 
senses ; he bent over her with all the fondness and tender- 
ness she had awakened : 

“ Violet !” 

It was only one word he spoke, but in it all was uttered 
to them both. 

She lifted her eyes to his ; he put his arms round her and 
drew her to his heart, pressing his lips on hers in kisses 
long and passionate as those that doomed Francesca. 
And the stars shone softly, and the flowers bowed their 
lovely heads, and the nightingales sang joyously under the 
sweet May skies, while two passionate human hearts met 
and were at rest. 

“Violet, ray love, my dearest, you are mine I” murmured 
Sabretasche, fondly leaning over her with the gentle and 
earnest tenderness that lay in the character of this soi- 
disant gay and heartless flirt. 

“Yours for life and death — yours forever I” answered 
Violet, looking up into his eyes, then drooping her head 
upon his shoulder, with a blush raised by the fervid gaze 
she met. 

“ God bless you I” He was too deeply moved to find 
his usual eloquence. It was eloquence enough between 
them to be there heart to heart, with the love pent up of 
late in both expressed in that fond and silent communion. 

“Darling,” whispered Sabretasche, after many minutes 
had passed away, “ you give me your love, though I seemed 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


385 


80 long to reject it ! You can never guess all that I have 
suflered, all ray teraptations, all my struggles. I have 
much to tell you — you alone; but not to-night. I can 
think of nothing but ray own happiness ; it is so long since 
I have been happy I Twenty years ! longer than your 
life, Yiolet!” 

“And I can make you happy 

“Yes!” He said it with a sigh of delight, as of a man 
who thrown ofl* his heart a heavy burden carried through 
lengthened years. “ Happy as I never hoped — as, since 
my boyish days, I never dreamed — as certainly my life has 
never merited I My love has been a curse to many women, 
Violet ; it shall never be so to you. But I do not deserve 
to have a woman’s heart all that yours is to me — all that 
you make it to me, with your noble trust, your frank affec- 
tion, your high intelligence, your generous soul. I have 
loved many before you; I shall never love others after 
you. You have roused all the passions of my youth, all 
the tenderness of my manhood. To make your peace I 
would lay down my life to-night, and without you that life 
would be a curse insupportable. My own love, my last 
love I what words can tell you all you are to me ? If pas- 
sion had no other utterance than speech, it would remain 
unspoken I” 

He rested his lips on her brow, his heart throbbing loud 
against hers. They stayed long in their delicious solitude, 
while the stars grew clearer in tlie May midnight, and the 
nightingale’s song sweeter, and the scent of the flowers 
mingled with the fountain’s silvery play ; and Violet Moly- 
neux learned all the depths of tenderness, gentleness, and 
aflection yearning for response, which lay hid from the 
world’s eye, as silver lies deep in the core of the earth, in 
the heart of this man, whom society counted as a roue 
without conscience, of perfect taste and utter heartless- 

33 a 


VOL. I. 


886 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ness, as fatal to her sex as he was charming to them, a 
lion who could be touched by nothing, an ame damnee 
only to be countenanced because he was rich, courted, and 
the fashion I 

When they went back into the ball-room the waltz had 
its 3harm, the music its melody, the flowers their fragrance 
again, for Violet; for a touch of the hand, a glance of the 
eye was sufficient eloquence between them, and his whispered 
good night, as he led her to her carriage, was dearer to her 
than any flattery poet or prince had ever breathed; nay, 
she was so happy that she even smiled brightly on Regalia, 
to her mother^s joy — so happy, that when she reached the 
solitude of her own chamber, she threw herself on her 
knees in her glittering gossamer ball-dress, and thanked 
God for the new joy of her life with as unchecked and im- 
petuous tears of rapture as if she had been Little Alma 
in her cottage home rather than the beauty of the season, 
with coronets at her feet. 

Lord Molyueux was a poor Irish peer; Sabretasche v/as 
rich, of high family, bien re 9 u in the most exclusive circles, 
a man whose word was law, whose pre-eminence in fashion 
and ton was acknowledged, whose admiration was honor, 
and at whose offer of marriage, if he had condescended to 
make any, no parent in all town, though the Colonel wab 
a commoner, would have failed to feel ecstatically delighted 
au fond de son coeur. His social position was so good, his 
settlements would be so unexceptionable, why! even our 
dear saint, the Bishop of Comet-Hock, though he shook 
his head over Sabretasche’s sins, and expressed his opinion 
with considerable certainty concerning the warmth of his 
ultimate reception — you know where — would have handed 
him over, with the greatest eagerness, either of hi* pretty, 
extravagant daughters, had the Colonel deigned to ask for 
one of them. Therefore, when Sabretasche called on him 




GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


387 


the morning after Leila PuffdofPs ball, and made formal 
proposals for Violet, Jockey Jack, though considerably 
astonished — as society had settled that Sabretasche would 
nerer marry as decidedly as it had settled that he was Me- 
phistopheles in fascinating guise — was excessively pleased, 
assented readily, and had but one drawback on his mind — 
telling his wife — that lady having set her affections on 
things above, namely, little Regalia’s balls and strawberry- 
leaves. However, Lady Molyneux’s chief aiin was to marry 
her daughter somehow as early as possible, so as not to have 
two milliners’ bills to pay and so attractive a face always 
out with her, and she assented languidly, not by any means 
particularly pleased, but having no earthly grounds on 
which to object to such a man and such an offer. So 
Sabretasche was received into the Molyneux family, and 
made himself welcome there, as he always could every- 
where when he took the trouble, with his indolent grace, 
his patrician pride, and his calm courtesy, which somehow 
compelled extremest courtesy in return. 

When he came out of Jockey Jack’s study that morn- 
ing, he naturally took his way to Violet’s boudoir, where* 
his young love sat, a book it is true in her lap, but her lips 
parted, and her eyes resting on his statuette of her grey- 
hound, in a sweet dream of “yesterday.” She sprang up 
as he entered, with such delight in her face, so fond a 
smile, and so bright a blush, that Sabretasche thought he 
had never seen anything of half so much beauty, sated as 
be had been with beauty all his days. 

“How lovely you are, Violet!” he said, involuntarily, 
some minutes after, as he sat beside her on the couch, 
parsing his hand over the soft perfumed hair that rested 
against his arm. 

“ Oh, do not you tell me that. So many do !” cried 
Violet “I like you to see in me what no one else sees.’' 


% 


S8S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


‘*1 see a great deal in you that no one else sees; whole 
*ableaux of heart and mind, that no one else can have a 
glance at,” said Sabretasche, smiling. “But I am proud 
of your beauty, my lovely Francesca, for all that; though 
it may be a fact patent to all eyes.” 

“Then I am glad I have it,” said Yiolet, naively. “I 
love you to be proud of anything in me you know. 1 
would be a thousand times worthier of you if I could.” 

“The difficulty ‘to be worthy’ is not on your side,” said 
he, with a shade of his old sadness. “I cannot bear to 
think that a life so pure as yours should be dedicated to a 
life so impure as mine. How spotless is your past, Yiolet 
I — how dark is mine !” 

“But how few have been ray temptations — how many 
yours!” interrupted Yiolet. “A woman — especially an 
unmarried one — is so fenced in and guarded by society 
and her home, that her virtue is little merit. What heavy 
punishment would fall on her if she departed from it I But 
with men it is so different; from the moment they are 
launched into the world temptations and incentives assail 
them on every side, and meet them at every turn. All 
things combine to lure them into pleasure, and they are 
no gods to resist the nature with which they are created. 
Society, custom, their companions, their literature, their 
amusements — all are so many Circe’s wiles; and when 
they yield to them, they know society will grant them im- 
punity. Everything tempts them ; and if they are tempted, 
they only yield to the bias with which they were born, being 
mortal men and not marble statues. The world loves con- 
demning. It would do well I think to remember the baits 
it itself throws out — baits to which all men, sooner or later, 
more or less, openly or sub rosd, yield. If you have any- 
thing to tell me, tell it fearlessly. I shall not love you the 
less, through whatever fires you may have passed. A 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


38S 


woman’s office is to console, not to censure ; and if a man 
has trust in her enough to reveal any of his past sins or 
sorrows to her, her pleasure should be to teach him to 
forsake them and forget them in a fresher, fairer, happier 
existence.” 

“My precious Yiolet! God bless you for your noble 
love I If my care and tenderness can ever repay it, your 
future shall reward you,” whispered Sabretasclie, with a 
deep sigh of rest, in the full and complete happiness he 
had at last attained. “What I have chiefly to tell you is 
of wrongs done to me — wrongs that have sealed my lips to 
you till now — wrongs that have weighed on me for twenty 
long years, and made me the enigmatical and wayward man 
I probably have seemed. It is a long story, darling, but 
one I would rather you should know before you fully give 
yourself to me.” 

She looked up at him with a fond smile, a silent promise 
that in heart she was already given to him; and leaning 
against him, with his arm round her, and her hand in his, 
Violet listened to the story — that every different scandal- 
monger had guessed at, and each separate coterie tried, 
and vainly tried, to probe — the story of the Colonel’s 
early life. 


II. 


THE SKELETON THAT SOCIETY HAD NEVER SEEN. 

“You know,” began Sabretasche, “that I was born and 
educated in Italy, and indulged in all things by my father, 
(who loved me tenderly for the sake of my young mother, 
whom he had idolized, and who had died when I was six 
years old,) and, accustomed to every luxury, I grew up 
with much of the softness, voluptuousness, and fervent 

33 * 


390 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


short-lived passion of the Italian character, while at fifteen 
I knew life as many a man of five-and-twenty, brought up 
in seclusion and puritanism here, does not. But though I 
was an officer in the Neapolitan service, and first in 
pleasure and levity among the young Italian noblesse, I 
was still impressionable and romantic, with too much of 
the poetry and imagination of the country in me to be 
blase, though I might be inconstant. I never recall the 
memory of ray youth, up to twenty, without regret — it was 
so full of enjoyment, of soft dreams, sweet as an idyl from 
ray rich imagination, of delicious pleasures, which had all 
the charm of freshness, all the gusto of youth, changing 
each day with the brilliance and rapidity of kaleidoscopic 
pictures, one chased away by another, none leaving a 
shadow behind ! In the summer of ray one-and-twentieth 
year I left Naples, during the hot season, to stay with a 
friend of mine, whose estates lay in Tuscany. You were 
in Tuscany last year. How fair the country is under the 
shadow of the Apennines, with its brown olive woods and 
its glorious sunsets I It is strange how the curse of its 
ingratitude to its noblest sons still clings to it, so favored 
by nature as it is I Della Torre’s place was some six or 
seven miles from Sienna. I had gone up to Florence pre- 
viously with my father, whose oldest friend was the then 
consul there ; and traveling across Tuscany when malaria 
was then rife, a low fever attacked me. I was traveling 
vetturino — there were no railways there in those days — 
and my servant, finding that I was much too ill to go on, 
stopped of his own accord at a village not very far from 
Cachiano. The single act of a servant, who would have 
died to serve either me or my father — poor fellow, he was 
shot down the other day among hundreds of insurgents ))y 
Bomba — grew into the curse of my life. The name of the 
village was Montepulto. I dare say you passed through 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


391 


it ; it is beautifully placed, its few scattered houses, witn 
their high peaked roofs, standing among the great groves 
of chestnuts and the gray thickets of olives, with sunny 
vineyards and tangled brushwoods of genista and myrtle 
lying in the glowing Tuscan sunlight. There Anzoletto 
stopped of his own accord. I was too ill to dissent; and 
as the carriage pulled up before the single wretched little 
inn the place afforded, the priest of the village, who was 
passing, offered me the use of his own house. I had 
hardly power to accept or refuse, but Anzoletto seized 
on the offer eagerly ; I believe he would have thought a 
Crown prince honored by giving house-room to his young 
milor, and I was conveyed to the priest’s house, where, for 
nine or ten days, I knew nothing, or next to nothing, of 
what passed, except that I suffered and dreamt. When I 
awoke from a deep sleep one evening into consciousness, I 
saw the red sunset streaming through the purple vine 
around my lattice, Anzoletto asleep by my bedside, and a 
woman of great beauty watching me : of great beauty, 
Violet, but not your beauty either. It seemed to me then 
the face of an angel : afterward, God forgive her I I knew 
it as the face of a fiend. She was Sylvia da Castrone, the 
niece, some said the daughter, of the priest of Montepulto. 
She was then three-and-twenty — when men love women 
their own age, or older, no good can come of it — and very 
beautiful : a Tuscan beauty, with a delicate Roman profile, 
blonde hair, and, what is rare for an Italian, a very fair, 
white skin, and long, large, dark eyes ; a lovely woman, in 
fact, with perfect contour, and a certain languid grace that 
charmed one like music. She had, too, a certain aristoc 
racy of air. The priest himself was of noble though 
decayed family; a sleek, silent, suave man, discontented 
with his humble position in Montepulto, but meek and 
lowly-minded, according to his own telling, as a religieux 


392 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


could DC. I awoke to see Sylvia da Castroue by my bed- 
side, I recovered to have her constantly beside me, to gaze 
on her dangerous charms in the equally dangerous lassitude 
of convalescence. There is a certain languid pleasure in 
recovery from illness when one is young that makes all 
things seem couleur de rose ; to me, with my impressionable 
senses and my Southern temperament, there was something 
in this seclusion amidst all that is softest and fairest in 
nature, shared with one as beautiful as the scenes among 
which I found her, which appealed irresistibly at once to 
poetry and passion, then the two most dominant elements 
in my character, in my dreams, and in my desires, with 
which no ambitions greater than those of pleasure, and no 
pains harsher than those of love, had at that time mingled 
Sufficient to say, I began to love Sylvia the first day her 
fair face bent over my couch ; as I recovered with rena 
vated strength, my love grew, till sense, prudence, keen- 
sightedness, all that might have restrained me, were sub- 
merged in it. I loved her fondly, tenderly, honorably, as 
ever man could love woman. I decked her in all the 
brilliant hues of a poet’s fancy, I thought her the realiza- 
tion of all my sweetest ideals, I believed I loved for all 
eternity. I never stopped to learn her nature, her char- 
acter, her thoughts; I never paused to learn if she in any 
way accorded to all my requirements and ideas; I loved 
her — I married her! Heavens, what that madness has 
cost me 1” 

The memory came over him with a deadly shudder ; at 
its recollection the fell shade it had so long cast on him 
returned again, and he pressed Violet convulsively to his 
heart, as if with her warm, young love to crush out the 
burden of that cold and cruel dead one. Violet was very 
pale; the intelligence of his marriage cast a death-like 
chill over her — the first gloom her bright life and high 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


393 


spirits had ever known ; but even in that her first impulse 
was to eonsole him. She lifted her head and kissed him, 
the first caress she had ever offered him, as if to show, 
more tenderly than words could give them, her sympathy 
and her affection. As silently and as fondly Sabretasche 
thanked her for the delicacy and comprehension which 
w'ere so grateful to him, and with an effort he resumed his 
story. 

“We were married — by the priest Castrone, and for a 
few weeks Montepulto was heaven to me, and I believed 
ray fondest and fairest dreams were realized. Violet, my 
darling, do not let my story pain you. All men have many 
early loves before they reach that fuller and stronger one 
which is the crown of their existence. I was happy, then, 
when I was a boy, and when you were not born, my Violet I 
— but you will give me still greater happiness, as passion- 
ate, and more perfect. We were married; and for a week 
or two the surrender of my liberty seemed trifling pay in- 
deed for the rapture it had brought me. The first shock 
back to actual life was a letter from my father. I dared 
not tell him of my hasty step; not from any anger that I 
should have met, but from the grief it would have caused 
him, for the only thing he had ever interdicted to me was 
an early or an unequal marriage. Fortunately, the letter 
was only to ask me to go to England on some business for 
him. I went, of course, taking Sylvia with me; and while 
in London, at her suggestion, (it did not occur to me, or I 
should have made it,) we had the ceremony again per- 
formed in a Protestant church, the rectory-church at Mary- 
lebone. She said it pleased her to be united to me by the 
religion of my country as well as of her own. I loved her, 
and believed her, and was only too happy to make still 
faster, if I could, the church fetters which bound me to a 
woman I idolized 1 We were a month or two in England 


504 GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

I took lier into Wales and to the Lakes; then we returned 
to Italy, and I bought for her a pretty little villa just out- 
side Naples, where every spare moment that I had formerly 
given to dissipation or amusement, or idle dreaming by the 
sea-shore, I now gave to ray wife. Oh, my darling! that 
any should have borne that title before you ! Gradually 
now dawned on me the truth which she had carefully con- 
cealed during our earlier intercourse; that, graceful, gentle, 
perfect lady as she was in seeming, her temper was the 
temper of a devil, her passions such as would have dis- 
graced the vilest woman in a street-brawl. Can you not 
fancy, Violet, what it was to me, with my taste, as it 
always has been over-sensitive and refined, accustomed at 
home to have ever the gentlest tones and the softest voices, 
abhorring an approach to what was harsh, or vulgar, or 
unharmonious, to hear the woman I worshiped meet me, 
if I was a moment later than she expected, or the presents 
I brought her a trifle less costly than she had anticipated 
— meet me with a torrent of reproaches and invectives, to 
see her beautiful features distorted with fury, her soft eyes 
lurid with flame, her coral lips quivering with deadly venom, 
railing alike at her dogs, her servants, and her husband ! — 
a fury — a she-devil ! Good Heavens ! what fiercer torment 
can there be for man, than to be linked for life with a vixen, 
a virago ? None can tell how it wears all the beauty of his 
life away ; how, surely, like the dropping of water on a stone, 
it eats away his peace ; how it lowers him, how it degrades 
him in his own eyes, how it drags him down to her own 
level, until it is a miracle if it do not rouse in him her own 
coarse and humiliating passions 1 Looking back on those 
daily scenes of disgrace and misery, which grew, as week 
and month rolled by, each time worse and worse, when my 
words ceased to have the slightest weight, I wonder how I 
endured them as I did; yet what is more iucredible still, I 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


395 


yet loved her, loved her despite the hideous deformity of 
her fiendish nature; for a virago is a fiend, and of the 
deadliest sort. Still, though my life grew a very agony to 
me, and the weight of my secret from my father grew un- 
bearable — I dared not tell him, he was in such delicate 
health the shock might have been fatal — I was never 
neglectful of her. Strange as it seems, little as the world 
would believe it, I was most constant to, and most patient 
with her. I have done little good in my life, God knows; 
but in my duty as a husband to her, boy as I was, I may 
truly say I never failed. Not quite twelve months after 
our marriage, Sylvia gave birth to a daughter. I was very 
sorry. I am not domestic — never shall be — and a child 
was the last inconvenience and annoyance I should have 
wished added to the menage. I hoped, however, that it 
might soften her temper. It did not; and my life became 
literally a curse to me. 

‘‘At this time Sylvia’s brother came to Naples, a showy, 
handsome, vulgar young man, with none of her exterior 
delicacy and aristocracy, who had been my detestation in 
Montepulto ; for anything that shocked my refinement was 
always, as you are aware, to my fastidious senses, unbear- 
able and intolerable. Naturally he came to his sister’s 
house, though he had no liking for me, and I believe our 
antipathy was mutual; but he quartered himself on his 
sister, for he was poor, and had nothing to do, and I 
generally found him there when I went to her villa, which 
was as often as I was free from military duties, or from ray 
father’s house, and could get away without observation 
from my brother officers and the gay whirl of Neapolitan 
society, where I was a lion and a pet. Almost invariably, 
when I went there after Guiseppe da Castrone’s arrival, I 
found him and some of his friends — rollicking, do-nothing, 
vulgar mauvais sujets, like himself — smoking and drinking 


396 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


there ; while Sylvia, decked with her old smiles, and adorned 
in the rich dress it had been my delight to bestow on her, 
lay on her soft couch. She had all the languor and indo- 
lence of a Southern, flirting her fan or touching her guitar; 
her lovely voice had been one of her greatest charms for 
me, but, once married, she never took the trouble to let 
me hear it. The men were odious to me, accustomed as I 
was to the best society of the old Italian noblesse, and 
born with only too sensitive a disgust for a common tone 
and mauvais ton, but I was so sick and heart-weary of the 
constant contentions and storms that awaited me in my 
wife’s home, that I was glad of the presence of other per- 
sons to prevent the tete-a-tete, which was certain to be a 
scene of passion and abuse, and to restore the smiles to 
the face which for me now only wore a frown or a sneer. 
The chief visitor at Sylvia’s house was a friend of her 
brother’s — an artist of the name of Lani — a young fellow 
of five or six-and-twenty, who considered himself an Adonis, 
I believe, for he was exceedingly handsome, in a coarse, 
full-colored style, though utterly detestable in my ideas, 
with his loud voice, his vulgar fopism, and his would-be 
wit. He pleased Sylvia, however; a fact to which I never 
attached any importance, for I was not at all of a suspicious 
or skeptical nature then, and I am never one of those who 
think that a woman must necessarily be faithless to her 
husband because she likes the society of another man ; on 
the contrary, a husband’s hold on her affection must be 
very slight, if, to keep it, he must subject her to a seclusion 
almost conventual. Fidelity is no fidelity unless it has 
opportunity to swerve if it choose. So, though I received 
the furies, he the smiles, to be jealous of Lani never occurred 
to me. I, haughty, refined, courted Yivian Sabretasche, 
to condescend to jealousy of this vulgar, presumptuous, 
coarse-minded young fellow I — I could never have st<^oped 


GRANVILI.E DE VIGNE. 


397 


to it, had it even occurred to me, which it never did, fo^ i 
held my own honor infinitely too high to dream that an 
other could sully it. My trust and my security were rudely 
destroyed I Six months more went on. Sylvia clamored 
ceaselessly for the acknowledgment of our marriage; in 
vain I pleaded to her that my father was on his death-bed, 
that the physicians told me that the slightest mental shock 
would end his existence, and that as soon as ever I had 
lost him, which must be at farthest in a few months’ time, 
I would acknowledge her as ray wife, and take her to 
England, where large property had just been left me. Such 
a plea would, you would think, have been enough for any 
woman’s heart. It availed nothing with her ; she made it 
the occasion for such awful storms of execration and passion 
as I pray Heaven I may never see in woman or man again. 
I refused to endanger ray father’s life to please her caprices. 
The result was a scene so degrading to her, so full of shame 
and misery to me, that for several days I could not bring 
myself to enter her presence again. My love was gone, 
trampled under her coarse and cruel invectives. In the 
plaice of my lovely and idolized wife I found a fiend, and 
I repented too late the irrevocable folly and the iron fetters 
of an early marriage, the curse of so many men. When 
at last I went to the house of my wife, which should have 
been my home, and was ray hell, the windows of some of 
the, rooms which looked on to a veranda stood open; I 
walked up the gardens and through those windows into 
the rooms unannounced, as a man in his own house thinks 
he is at liberty to do. How one remembers trifles on such 
days of anguish as that was to me 1 I remember the play 
of the sunshine on the ilex-leaves, I remember how I 
brushed the boughs of the magnolias out of my path as I 
went up the veranda steps. Unseen myself, I saw Lani 
and my wife; his arms were round her, her head upon his 

34 


VOL. I. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 




breast, and I caught words which, though insufficient for 
law, told me of her infidelity. God help me I what I suf- 
fered I Young, unsuspicious, acutely sensitive, painfully 
alive to the slightest stain upon my honor, to be deplaced 
by this vulgar, low-bred rival! Great Heavens 1 how 
bitter was my shame I” 

Violet’s hands clinched on his in a passion of sympathy 
for him and horror at his wrongs : 

“Oh, Vivian, my dearest ! how I grieve for you! how I 
hate her! Would to Heaven I could avenge it on her!” 

“Heath has avenged me, my darling !” said Sabretasche, 
gravely, gently soothing the vehement emotion his story 
had roused in Violet’s warm and impassioned nature before 
he resumed his narrative. “ Those few words that fell on 
my ear in the first paralyzed moment of dim horror at the 
treachery which had availed itself of my unsuspecting hos- 
pitality to rob me of my honor, were sufficient for me. 
Even then I had memory enough to keep myself from 
stooping to the degradation of a spy, and from lowering 
myself before the man who had betrayed me. I went 
farther into the room, and they saw me. Lani had the 
grace to look guilty and ashamed; for only the day before 
he had asked me to lend him money, and I had complied, 
he knowing all the while what reward he was giving me 
I remember being perfectly calm and self-possessed ; one 
often is in hours of the greatest suffering or excitement. 
I motioned him to the door: he slunk out like a hound 
afraid of a double thonging. The fellow had neither con- 
science, spirit, nor courage; he was a coward, and craven- 
hearted as those under-bred men often are at heart. He 
went out, and 1 was left alone with Sylvia — with my wife. 
Ho you wonder that for nineteen years I have loathed and 
abhorred that title, holding it as a synonym with all that 
u base, and treacherous, and shameful — a curse from which 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


399 


there is no escape — a clog, rather than take 'ivhich into hi*'* 
life a man had better forego all love, all pleasure, all pas- 
sion — a mess of porridge with poison in the cup, for which 
he must give up all the priceless birthright of liberty and 
peace, never enjoyed and never valued till they are lost 
forever, past recall ? 

'‘Do you think there was any shame, remorse, repentance 
on her face, any regret for the abuse of all my confidence, 
any sorrow for the true affection she had outraged, any 
consciousness of the fidelity thus repaid, of the trust thus 
returned ? No ; in her face there was only a devilish laugh. 
She met me with a sneer and a scoff ; she had the brazen 
falseness to deny her infidelity, for she knew that admission 
would divorce her and give me freedom ; and when I taxed 
her with it, she only answered with invectives, with violence, 
insult, and opprobrium. It ever seemed as if a devil entered 
into her when she became possessed with that fearful and 
fiend-like passion. I will not sully your ears with all the 
disgraceful details of the scene where a woman, at once a 
virago and a liar, gave reins to her fell passions, and forgot 
sex, truth, all things, even common decency of language or 
of conduct; suffice it, it ended in worse violence still. Aa 
I rose, to leave her forever, and end the last of these hor- 
rible interviews, which destroyed all my self-respect and 
withered all my youth, she sprang upon me like a tigress, 
and struck at my breast with a stiletto, which lay on a table 
near, among other things of curious workmanship. Strong 
as I was at that time, I could scarcely master her — a furious 
woman is more savage in her wrath than any beast of prey 5 
she clung to me, yelling hideous words, and striking blindly 
at me with her dagger. Fortunately for me, the stiletto 
was old and blunt, and could not penetrate through the 
cloth of my coat. By sheer force I wrenched myself from 
her grasp, seized her wrists, unclinched her fingers from 


400 


GRANVILLE IE VIGNE. 


the iiaudle of the dagger, and left her prostrate, from the 
violence of her own passions, her beautiful hair unloosened 
in the struggle, her hands cut and tore in her own wild 
fencing with the stiletto, her eyes glaring with the ferocity 
of a tigress, her coral lips covered with foam. From that 
hour I never saw her face. Last week I read the tidings 
of her death.” 

Sabretasche paused. He had not recalled the dread 
memory of his marriage without bitter pain ; never till 
now had his lips breathed one word of his story to a 
living creature, and he could not lift the veil from the 
secret buried for eighteen years without some of the mur- 
derous air from the tomb poisoning the freer, purer at- 
mosphere he now breathed. It had a strangely strong 
effect on Violet. All the color fled from her lips and 
cheeks; she burst into convulsive sobs, and trembling 
painfully, shrank closer into the Colonel’s arms, as if the 
dead wife could come and claim him from her, his new 
young love, idolized so tenderly, wooed so fondly, with so 
bright and cloudless a future open before her. 

Gently and tenderly Sabretasche caressed and calmed 
her. 

“My precious Violet, I would not have told you my 
story if I had known how it would pain you. I did 
not like you to be in ignorance of my previous marriage, 
and I could not tell you the fact without telling you also 
the history of the wretched woman who held from me the 
title you have promised me to bear. But do not let it 
weigh on you, dearest. Great as my wrongs were, I can 
forgive them now. She can harm me no longer; and you 
will teach me in the sunshine of your presence to forget 
the deadly shadow of her past. I will tell you no more 
to-day, you look so pale. What will your mother say to 
me for sending away your brilliant bloom ? She likes me 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


40 i 


little enough already ! Do you wish me to go on ? Tnen 
promise me to give me ray old gay smiles; I should be 
sad, indeed, for my early fate to cast the slightest shade on 
your shadowlcss life. Well, I hjft her, as I said. It is 
useless to dwell on the anguish, the misery, the shame 
which had crowded into my young heart. If I had not 
cared for her it would not have stung me so keenly, but I 
had loved her generously and t^'uly and faithfully until 
then. To have my name stained, Tiy wife stolen from me, 
by such as that low-bred and spiritless cur, and to know 
that to this woman I was chained Cor life, fettered till one 
or other of us should be laid in the grave ! — it was enough 
to drive a man of one-and-twenty to any recklessness or 
any crime. With that shame and horror upon me, I had 
to watch over the dying hours of my father. He died, 
verj shortly afterward, in my arms, gently and peacefully, 
as he had spent his life. I saw the grave close over one 
from whom I had never had an angry word or a harsh 
glance, and at once reckless and heart-broken, I came to 
England. I took legal advice about my marriage ; they 
told me it was perfectly legal and valid, and that the evi- 
dence, however morally and rationally clear, was not strong 
enough to dissolve the unholy ties which bound me to one 
whom in my heart I knew as a virago, a liar, an adulteress, 
who would, if she could, have added murder to her list of 
crimes. Of her I never had heaid a w^ord. I left her, at 
once and forever, to her lovers and her fell passions.” 

^‘Did the child die?” asked Violet. ‘“I wish you had 
had no child, Vivian. I am jealous of anything and every- 
thing that has ever been yours ; and, my Heaven ! how I 
hate that woman and all belonging to lier 1 Sin or no sin, 
I would give all I have on earth to revenge you. My 
dearest, my dearest 1 that y^u should have been so 


402 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Oh ! pray God that I may live and make atonement to 
you.” 

“ God reward you, my darling !” murmured Sabretasche, 
fondly. “You need be jealous of nothing in my past; 
Violet, none have been to me what you are and will be. 
I never remembered the child. She was nothing to me ; 
how could I even know that she was mine? But some 
years afterward, they told me she had died in infancy. So 
best with such a mother I What could she but be now ? 
I came to England, joined the Dashers, and began the life 
I have led ever since, plunging into the wildest dissipations, 
to try and still the fatal memories that stirred within me, 
revenging myself on that heartless and false sex whom I 
had before trusted and worshiped, gaining for myself the 
reputation, to which your mother and the rest of the world 
still hold, of a fascinating vaurien and an unscrupulous 
profligate, none guessing how my heart ached while my 
lips laughed; how, skeptical by force, I yet longed to 
believe; and how, amidst my pleasures and sedatives, ex- 
citements and stimulants, the heart of my boyhood craved 
to love and be loved I Three years after my arrival here, 
the sight of Guiseppe da Castrone recalled to me the 
past in all its hideous horror. What errand do you think 
he, shameless as his sister, came upon ? None less than to 
extort money from me by the threat, in Sylvia’s name, that 
she would come over to England and proclaim herself my 
wife. I was weak to yield his demand to him, and not to 
have the servants show him at once out of the house; but 
money was plentiful, his presence was loathsome ; the idea 
of seeing Sylvia, of being forced to endure her presence, of 
having the mistress of young Lani known in England as 
my wife, was so horrible to me, that, without thinking, I 
snatched at the only means of security. I paid him wdiat he 
asked — exorbitant, of course — and hung that other mill* 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


403 


Btoiie round my neck for life ! But I would have given half 
my fortune to avoid the bitter disgrace of my marriage 
being known, and brought constantly before me; and a 
thousand out of the large income Moncrieff had left me 
seemed well paid, even every year or two, to avert the 
horror of her presence. From that time to within the last 
twelvemonth her brother has come to me, whenever his and 
her exchequer failed ; she was not above living on the hus- 
band she had wronged ! For nineteen years I kept my 
secret; all I had to remind me of my fatal tie was the 
annual visit of Castrone. Can any one wonder that when 
I met you I forgot oftentimes my own fetters, and, what 
was worse, your danger ? In my many loves I had only, I 
confess, sought pleasure and revenged myself on Sylvia’s 
sex — how could I think well or mercifully of women ? But 
you roused in me something inhnitely stronger, deeper, and 
more tender. In you the soft idyls of my lost dreams lived 
again; with you the grace and glory of my lost youth 
returned ; in you, for the first time, I realized all I had 
sacrificed in relinquishing my liberty. Before, as a man of 
the world — bitterly as I feel the secret disgrace of it — I 
had experienced no inconvenience from the tie. I had 
wooed many lightly, won them easily, forsaken them reck- 
lessly. None of the three could I do with you. They 
had only charmed my senses; you, in addition, won into 
my heart; they had amused me, you grew dear to me — a 
wide difference, Yiolet, in a woman’s influence upon a man. 
At first, I confess I flirted carelessly with you, without 
thinking, as it had been my habit of doing with all women 
as fair as you are, without remembering my fetters or your 
danger. But when the full beauties of your heart and 
mind, rarer even than the rare beauty of your form and 
features, unfolded themselves to me for the first time, I 
remembered mercy, even while I learnt that for the last 


404 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


time I loved. How great were my own sufferings I need not 
to tell you. Unable to bear the misery of constant inter- 
course with you, conscious in myself that if long under the 
temptation I should give way under it and say words for 
which, when you knew all, you might learn to hate me 

“ Oh, never, never I” whispered Violet, fondly. “ I should 
always love you, Vivian, come what might.” 

Sabretasche passed his hand fondly over her high-arched 
brow; his manner, always most soft and gentle, had deep- 
ened into a singularly loving tenderness with Violet, around 
whom all the inborn poetry and depth of feeling, which in 
its strength almost amounted to melancholy in this soi- 
disant gay and fashionable ame damnee of aristocratic 
circles, had now gathered and intensified. 

“My darling, I knew well that you would. But it was 
the very consciousness that, ^you loved, you would love 
very differently to the frivolous and inconstant women of 
our set, which roused me into mercy to you, where with 
others I had always forgotten it, for the simple reason that 
they never merited it or needed it. So I left for the south 
of France, to give myself time for reflection, or — vain 
hope I — to forget you, as I had forgotten many ; to give 
you time to find, if it so chanced, some one who, more 
worthy of your attachment, would reward it with the 
legitimatized happiness which the world allows and smiles 
upon approvingly. I traveled to the Pyrenees. In a week 
from leaving London I was in Biarritz, intending to go on 
eastward into the Orientales, to stay there for some time 
for the sake of the sea-bathing ; but the first evening I was 
at Biarritz I took up, over my chocolate, an Italian news- 
paper — how it chanced to come there I knew not — it was 
the Nazionale of Naples. Among the deaths I read that 
of my wife I Great Heaven I that a husband’s first thoughts 
should be a thanksgiving for the death of the woman he 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


406 


once fondly loved, over whose sleep he once watched, and 
in whom he once reposed his name, his trust, his honor I 
Violet, what I felt when that single line in the Italian 
journal gave me back liberty, life, youth, everything that 
existence holds of brightest and sweetest in giving me you, 
w’ords could never say I I read it over and over again, the 
letters danced and swam before my eyes; I, whom the 
world says nothing can disturb or ruffle, shook in every 
nerve, as I leaned out into the evening air, dizzy and deli- 
rious with the rush of past memories and future hopes that 
surged over ray brain. With that one fateful line I was 
free! No prisoner ever welcomed liberty with such rap- 
turous ecstasy as I. The blight was off my life, the curse 
was taken from my soul, my heart beat free again as it had 
never done during the twenty long years that the bitter 
shame and misery of my marriage had weighed upon me. 
Love and youth and joy were mine again. A new exist- 
ence, fresher and fairer, had come back to me. My cruel 
enemy, she who had corroded my life with her fiend-like 
and venomous tongue, who had given my honor to a low- 
bred cur, only fit to associate with my footmen, and who 
had yet stooped to live on the money she robbed from the 
boy-husband she had wronged, was dead, and I at last was 
free — free to offer to you the truest and fondest love man 
ever offered woman — free to receive at your hands the 
golden gifts, robbed from me for so long. Violet — dear- 
est, I know that I shall not ask for them in vain.” 

She lifted her face to his with broken yet eloquent 
words, still greater eloquence in her eyes gleaming with 
unshed tears; and as his lips lingered upon hers, the new 
youth and joy he coveted came back to Sabretasche, never, 
ne fondly thought, to leave him again while both their lives 
should last. 


m 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


PART THE FOURTEENTH, 


I. 

ONE OP THE SUMMER DAYS BEPORE THE STORM. 

You look down in the mouth, old boy,” said Tom 
Severn, of the Queen’s Bays, to Regalia, at that lavish 
pleasant affair, a mess-breakfast, which the Guards were 
giving to us. 

“ Regalia’s in deep for Philaster, and he’s going lame,” 
suggested Curly. 

“No; he’s turned over Julia for La Yivonne, and the 
inconstancy’s weighing on his mind,” put in Rushbrooke 
of Ours. 

“Wrong, all of you!” laughed Monckton, who always 
said an ill-natured thing if he had the opportunity. “Re- 
galia’s done for, since Sabretasche has cut in and carried 
off that handsome Molyneux girl 1” 

“Regalia’s plenty of fellow^-sufferers, then,” said De 
Vigne, who, with all his cynicism, always came to any- 
body’s rescue if he thought them ill treated. “1 expect 
there’ll be no end of Found Drowned in the Serpentine, 
since Sabretasche has committed himself — of women for 
him! of men for her! Violet is positively an injury to the 
service !” 

“ Court-martial her !” cried Curly. “ She’d look devilish 
pretty drummed through a regiment 1” 

“I am sorry,” continued De Vigne, pathetically, “that 
Sabretasche is going to marry. I never dreamed he would. 
I should as soon have thought of his turning brewer, or 
writing a book on the Millennium. It is such a pityl 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


407 


He is such a charming fellow as he is ! His little dinners 
are perfection, and I never enjoy lansquenet anywhere so 
much as at his house.” 

“ Selfish enough, De Yigne, I must say,” said I, laugh- 
ing. “It would be rather hard to deprive poor Sabre- 
tasche of his love because you like his lansquenet. But 
take courage : we shall have him and his card-parties all 
the same. Yiolet’s not the sort of girl to put a stop to 
his enjoying life.” 

“No; I admit Yiolet is the only woman to whom I 
could endure to see him sacrificed. En meme temps,” 
said De Yigne, with his usual sarcastic fling, which he 
could no more help than a schoolboy can help shying a 
stone when he sees a cat, “you know, my dear Arthur, as 
well as I do, that there is a peculiarly frosty breath in mar- 
riage, which chills the sweetest temper, and changes the 
brightest sunbeams into the hardest icicles I” With which 
De Yigne sat himself down to ecarte with Regalia at five 
guineas a side. 

So we talked over Sabretasche and his fiancee, while 
they, regardless of the babble going on in all the noisy 
brooks of gossip that brawled and rippled through the 
many channels of West-end talk, spent, I have no doubt, 
days that were entered with a mark of purest gold in the 
cloudless life of each. His old accustomed bay-window 
saw comparatively little of him; his mornings were given 
to Yiolet in the delicious tete-a-tete of her boudoir ; in the 
Ride and the Ring he was by her side or in her carriage ; 
the whist-tables of the United, the guinea points of the 
Travelers’, the coulisses of the Opera, the lansquenet par- 
ties at De Yigne’s, saw but very little of him; he was 
waltzing with her at balls, or singing Italian with her after 
dinner-parties. The Colonel, for the time being, was lost 
to us and to “life,” which he had lived so recklessly and 


408 


GRANVILLE PE VIGNE 


graced so brilliantly for so many years ; and I suppose his 
new occupation charmed him, for when we did get an hour 
or two of him, he was certainly more delightful than ever ; 
there was such a joyous ring in his ever-brilliant wit — ■ 
such gentleness and kindness, to all people and all things, 
out of the abundance of his own happiness — such a depth 
of rest and contentment, in lieu of that touching and deep- 
seated melancholy, which had gone down so far into his 
character under his gay and fashionable exterior, that it 
had seemed as if nothing would uproot it. So happily 
does human life forget its past sorrows in present joy, as 
the green meadows grow dark or golden, according as the 
summer sun fades on and olf them, that the bitterness so 
long upon him from his unhappy marriage was entirely 
dissipated in the beauty of his new existence, and though 
probably, as time rolled on, the past would occasionally rise 
up, and the pain of the last twenty years leave a certain 
sadness upon his character, now, in the fullness of his love 
and the sweetness of his dawning future, Yivian Sabre- 
tasche could from his heart say what some men go down 
from their cradles to their graves without knowing even 
for an hour or a day — that life had given him perfect and 
cloudless happiness! It was now the first week of June, 
the season was at its height, and the 10th of July was 
fixed for Sabretasche’s marriage. He had pressed the 
Molyneux for a shorter engagement than is usual, and 
peres et meres show no inclination to procrastinate when 
men offer such splendid settlements as the Colonel, out of 
pure lavish love for his young bride, voluntarily proposed I 
So the marriage-day was fixed, and Sabretasche had 
bought a villa beside Windermere to enjoy a seclusion such 
as suited his poet’s heart and lover’s dreams; he said he 
had no fancy to spoil his golden days in railway carriages 
and continental hotels, and the Dilcoosha, perfect already. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


409 


was being refitted, and having its lilies painted and its gold 
refined to be worthy to shrine his new and dearest idol. 
All the prosaic details that attend on love in these doys of 
matter-of-fact and almighty dollars, (how often to tarnish 
and corrode it I) caught the soft hues of his own poetic 
and tender nature, and grew in his hands into the generous 
gifts of love to love, the outward symbols of the inward 
worship. So surrounded, and with such a future lying 
before her, in its brilliant colors and seductive witchery, can 
you not fancy that our ever-radiant belle looked — how, 
words are not warm enough to tell; it would need a brush 
of power even diviner than Raphael’s to picture to you 
Violet Molyneux’s face as it was then, the incarnation of 
young, shadowless, tender, brilliant, impassioned life I God 
help us! when the summer day is at its brightest, closest 
hovers the brooding storm ! ^ 

The 'Derby fell late that year. The day was a brilliant, 
sunshiny one, as it ought to be, for it is the sole day in our 
existence when we are excited, and do not, as usual, think 
it necessary to be bored to death to save our characters. 
We confess to a wild anxiety at the magic word “ Start 1” to 
which no other sight on earth could rouse us. We watch 
with thrilling eagerness the horses rounding the corner as we 
should watch the beauty of no Galatea, however irresistible, 
and we see the favorite win the distance with enthusiastic joy, 
to which all the other excitements upon earth could never 
fire our blood. From my earliest recollection since I rodo 
races with the stable-boys at five years old, and was dis- 
covered indulging in’ that reprehensible pastime by my 
tutor, (a mild and inoffensive Ch. Ch. man, to whom Bell's 
Life was a dead letter, and the chariot-racing at Rome and 
Elis the only painful reading in the classics,) my passion 
has been for the Turf. No sight is to me more delight- 
ful than all those thorough-breds at the Warren, with their 

35 


VOL. T- 


410 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. • 


body-clothing off, and their firm, slender limbs uncovered ; 
no moment dearer than when the favorite, bearing the hopes 
and the fears of thousands, skimming the earth like a swal- 
low in its flight, pulls up at the distance, with the ruck 
straggling behind him, while myriad shouts from the stands 
and the ropes proclaim him winner of the Derby. The 
Turf! — there must needs be some strange attraction in our 
English sport — it has lovers more faithful than women 
ever win ; it has victims, voluntary holocausts upon its 
altars, more numerous than any creed that ever brought 
men to martyrdom; its iron chains are hugged where 
other silken fetters have grown wearisome ; its fascination 
lasts, while the taste of the wine may pall and the beauty 
of feminine grace may satiate. Men are constant to its 
mystic charms where they tire of love’s beguilements ; they 
give with a lavish hand to it what they would deny to any 
living thing. Olden chivalry, modern ambition, boast no 
disciples so faithful as the followers of the Turf, and to the 
Turf men yield up what women whom they love would ask 
in vain : lands, fortune, years, energies, powers — til! their 
mistress has beggared them of all, even too often robbed 
them of honor itself! 

To the Derby, of course, we went — Curly, I, and some 
other men, in De Yigne’s drag, lunched off Rhenish, and 
Guinness, and Moet, and all the delicacies Fortnum and 
Mason ever packed in a hamper for Epsom; and drove 
back to mess along the crowded road. Dropping the 
others en route, De Yigne drove me on to dine with him 
at his own house in Grosvenor Placd. 

“Come into my room first, old fellow,” he said, as wo 
passed up the stairs. “I bought my wedding-presents for 
Sabretasche and his wife that will be, yesterday, and I 
want to show them to you. Halloa ! what the deuce is 
that fellow Raymond doing? — reading my letters, as I 
live ! I think I am fated to come across rascals ! How 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


411 


ever, as they make up nine-tenths of the world, I suppose 
I can’t be surprised at the constant rencontres !” 

From the top of the staircase we saw, though at some 
distance, straight through into De Yigne’s bed-room, the 
door of which stood open. At the writing-table in the 
center sat his head valet, Raymond, so earnestly reading 
some of the letters upon it, that he never heard or saw us. 
De Yigne sometimes wrote his letters in his bed-room ; he 
always read those by the first post over his matutinal cof- 
fee ; and as he was immeasurably careless both with his 
papers and his money, his servants had always full oppor- 
tunity to peruse the one and take the other. If he had 
seen the man taking ten pounds off his dressing-table, he 
would have had a fling at human nature, thought it was 
the way of that class of people, and kept the man on, be- 
cause he was a useful servant, and no more of a thief, 
probably, than another would be. But — no matter in 
what rank — a dishonorable or a sneaky thing, a breach of 
trust in any way, always irritated him beyond conception; 
he had been betrayed in greater or minor things so often, 
and treachery was so utterly foreign to his own frank and 
impetuous nature, that his impatience at it was very par- 
donable. I could see his ominous eyebrows contract; he 
went up, stretched his hand over the man’s shoulder, and 
took the letter quietly out of his grasp. 

“ Go to Mills for your next month’s wages, and leave 
this evening.” 

Raymond, sleek, and smooth, and impenetrable as ho 
was, started violently, and changed color; but his answer 
was very ready. 

“Why, Major? I was merely sorting your papers, sir. 
You have often ordered me to do that.” 

“No lies — leave the room!” said his master, briefly, aa 
he turned to me. “Arthur, here are the things I men* 
fioned. Come and look at them ” 


412 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


His valet did not obey his order; he still lingered. He 
began again, in his soft, purring tone; 

“You wouldn’t dismiss me like this, Major, if you knew 
what I could tell you.” 

“Leave the room, and send Robert to me,” said He 
Vigne, with that stern hauteur that alw'ays came up when 
people teased him. He had had his own way from his in- 
fancy, and was totally unaccustomed to being crossed. It 
is bad training for the world for a man to have been obeyed 
from his cradle. 

“You would give me a good deal, Major, to know what 
I know. I have a secret in my keeping, sir, that you would 
pay me handsomely to learn ” 

“ Silence — and leave the room !” reiterated De Yigne, 
with an impatient stamp of his foot. 

Raymond bowed, with a grace becoming a groom of the 
chambers. 

“ Certainly, sir. I hope you will pardon me for having 
troubled you.” 

Wherewith he backed out with all the sang-froid imagin- 
able, and De Yigne turned to me : 

“Cool fellow, isn’t he?” 

“Yes; but you might as well have heard what he had 
to say.” 

“My dear fellow, why?” cried De Yigne, with his most 
grandiose and contemptuous smile. “What could that 
man possibly know that could concern me? It was only a 
ruse to get money out of me, or twist his low-bred curiosity 
in spying over my letters into a matter of moment. I was 
especially annoyed at it, because the letter he was reading 
is a note from Alma : nothing in it — merely to answer a 
question I asked her about one of her pictures ; but you 
know the child has an enthusiastic way of expressing her- 
self at all times — means nothing, but sounds a great deal 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


4in 


and the ‘Dear Sir Folko/ and ‘your ever-grateful Little 
Alma,’ and all the rest of it — the days are so long when I 
don’t go to see her, and she envies the women who are in 
my set and always with me — and all that — reads rather 
. . . . / know how she means it, but a common man like 
llaymond will put a very different significance upon it.” 

“ Most probably 7 know how she means it too ; still, 
you know the old saying, De Yigne, relative to toying with 
edged tools ?” 

“No, I don’t,” said De Vigne, curtly; “or at least I 
should say I know edged tools, when I see them, as well 
as you do, and am old enough, if I did come across them, 
not to cut myself with them. I can’t think what has pos- 
sessed Sabretasche and you to try and sermonize to me ! 
Heaven knows you need to lecture yourselves, both of you. 
I don’t stand it very well from him ; but I’ll be shot if I 
do from you, you young dog, whom I patronized in jackets 
at Frestonhills ! Get out with you, and let Robert take 
the Derby dust off you in the blue-room.” 

And he threw Alma’s note into a private drawer (to be 
kept, I wonder ?) and pushed me out by the shoulders. 

No Cup day ever was so ill-bred as to send dusky Eng- 
lish rain-drops on the exquisite toilettes that grace the 
most aristocratic race in the universe, and we had “Queen’s 
weather” for Ascot. We had all betted on La Violette, 
the Colonel’s beautiful chestnut, who was the favorite in 
the betting-rooms at Tattersall’s as well, and as Tom 
Severn said, he didn’t know which looked the loveliest in 
its own way. La Violette with her wild eye, her graceful 
symmetrical limbs, and her coat like silk, or Violet herself, 
with her Paris toilette, her brilliant beauty, and her joyous 
unrestrained animation of speech and of regard. La Vio- 
lette won the Ascot Cup, distancing all the rest of the first 
flight at an easy swinging gallop, without any apparent 

8o* 


414 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


effort; and when we had seen the race fairly run, we wenv 
up to the Molyneux carriage to congratulate the Colonel 
on his chestnut’s triumph : Sabretasche being missed from 
his usual circle of titled betting-men and great turfites, 
and, for the first time in all his life, watching Ascot run, 
with his attention more given to the face beside him than 
the course before. 

“I knew we should win !” cried Yiolet, with the greatest 
delight in her namesake’s triumph. “ Did not I tell you 
so. Major De Vigne ?” 

“You did, fair prophetess; and if you will always honor 
me with your clairvoyant instructions, I will always make 
up my books accordingly.” 

“The number of bets I have made to-day is something 
frightful,” answered Yiolet. “If that darling horse had 
failed me I should have been utterly ruined in gloves.” 

“As it is, you will have bracelets and negliges enough 
to fill Hunt and Roskell’s. You are most dangerous to 
approach. Miss Molyneux, in more ways than one,” said 
Yane Castleton, who was leaning against the carriage door 
flirting with her mother. 

“Oh! pray don’t. Lord Yane; you talk as if I were 
some grim and terrible Thalestris !” cried Yiolet, with con- 
temptuous impatience, looking at Sabretasche with a laugh. 

It was pretty to see how, in the midst of her laughter, 
and chat, and merriment with other men, she turned to him 
every minute, to meet the gaze of eyes which very rarely 
left their study of her face. They were both at once too 
delicate and too high-bred to bring any show or demonstra- 
tion of their attachment abroad in society; still the bright- 
ness of her regard when it turned on him, the softness of 
nis voice when he addressed her, were silent evidences 
enough of the sympathy between them. 

“Thalestris I” repeated Sabretasche, smiling. “ fou 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


415 


have but very little of the Amazone about you; not 
enough, perhaps, if your lines had fallen in hard places.’* 

“Instead of rose-leaves I Yet I think I can fight my 
own battles ?’’ 

“Oh yes I” laughed Sabretasche. “I never meant to 
hint but what you had, in very great perfection, that pre- 
rogative par excellence of woman, that Damascus blade — 
whose brilliant chasing makes us treat it as a toy, until 
the point has wounded us — the tongue !” 

“If mine is a Damascus blade, yours is an Excalibur 
Itself I” cried Violet, with her air moqueur. “Le fourgon 
se moque de la pelle, monsieur 

“An English inelegance taking refuge in a foreign idiom. 
What true feminine diplomacy I” laughed Sabretasche, rest- 
ing his eyes on her with that deep tenderness for her, for all 
she did, and said, and thought, which had grown into his 
life for Violet Molyneux. 

She laughed too — that sweet, gay laugh of perfect hap- 
piness. There are times when a simple word will woo us 
easily to laughter, there are others when all the wit in 
Europe fails to rouse a heart-felt smile. 

“Ah I there is her Majesty going off the stand — before 
Queen Violet goes, too 1” she went on. “Do tell me what 
I had to ask Major De Vigne. I know it was something 
very important, but I cannot remember, by any exertion ot 
memory, whatever it could be.” 

“What a happy thing for you that I can remember your 
affairs as well as my own,” smiled Sabretasche. “You 
wanted to ask him about Miss Tressillian, did you not?” 

“Oh yes! Thank you so much. Colonel Sabretasche 
tells me. Major De Vigne, that you know the artist of that 
lovely ‘ Louis Dix-sept,’ and that she is a young lady living 
at Richmond. May I go and see her ?” 

“Certainly, if you will be so kind.” 


416 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


De Vigne felt a certain annoyance ; why, I doubt il hw 
could have told — a certain selfish desire to keep his little 
flower blooming unseen, save by his own eyes, acting un- 
consciously upon him. 

“The kindness will be to me. Is she young? 

“ Yes.” 

“ How young ?” 

“Eighteen or nineteen, I believe.” 

“And very pretty ?” 

“Really I cannot say; ladies’ tastes differ from ours on 
such points.” 

“ I hope she is,” said Violet, plaintively. “ I never did 
like plain people, never could ! I dare say it is very wrong, 
but I think one likes a. handsome face as naturally as one 
prefers a lily to a dandelion; and I am quite certain the 
artist of that sketch must be pretty — she could not help it.” 

“She is pretty,” said Sabretasche; “at least attractive 
— what you will call so.” 

“ Then will you take me to see her to-morrow. Major De 
Vigne, and introduce us? Of course you will; no one 
refuses me anything! You can come with me, can you 
not, Vivian? We will all ride down there before luncheon, 
for once in awhile, shall we ?” 

“Yes, and lunch at the Dilcoosha, if Lady Molyneux 
permits ?” 

“Go where? Do what?” asked the Viscountess, lan- 
guidly, turning reluctantly from her, I presume, interest- 
ing conversation with Vane Castleton. 

Sabretasche repeated his question. 

“To see an artist, and lunch with you ? Oh yes, I shall 
be very happy. I don’t think we have any engagements 
for to-morrow morning,” said Lady Molyneux, turning 
again to Castleton. “Are you going to the Lumleys to- 
Bight, Vane ?” 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


41 *: 


The moruing after, half a dozen of us rode down out of 
Lowndes Square. First, the Colonel and his young fianeee ; 
next, the Viscountess and her pet. Vane Castleton; then 
De Vigne and I — De Vigne, I must confess, in one of hia 
haughtiest, most reserved, and most impatient moods, an- 
noyed, more than he knew, at having to take people to see 
Alma, whom he had had to himself so long that he seemed 
to consider any other visit to her as an invasion on his own 
“ vested interests,” and besides, he was irritated to be tricked 
into taking Vane Castleton there, of all men in the world. 
But Lady Molyneux had asked him ; De Vigne knew nothing 
of his addition to the party until he had reached Lowndes 
Square, and to make any comment on, or opposition to it, 
would have been as useless as unwise. The Colonel and 
Violet led the way. Sabretasche rode with the skill and 
speed of an Arab ; and she never looked to better advant- 
age than eii Amazone ; she rode, too, with admirable fear- 
lessness and grace, and her dark tight riding-jacket, with 
its little gold agraffes, and her black felt hat, with its long 
soft plumes nestling among her bright chestnut hair, showed 
to full beauty the perfect contour of her slight form, and the 
aristocratic and delicate loveliness of her face. I could not 
wonder at Sabretasche’s pride in, and tenderness over her, 
as she turned round her horse’s head as they drew near 
St. Crucis, her eyes gleaming and her cheeks a little flushed, 
and waited till we came up to them. 

“Are we near the house. Major De Vigne ?” 

“Within a stonc’s-throw.” 

“And does Miss Tressillian live there all alone ?” 

“No. The house is kept by an old nurse of hers.” 

“An old nurse? Poor girl, how lonely she must be! 1 
am very sorry for her.” And Violet contrasted her own 
perfect joy and golden future with Alma Tressillian 

2b 


418 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


desolate solitude, and confided it to Sabretasche as they 
cantered on again together. 

“I am too happy, Yivian !” she cried, passionately. 
“Sometimes I lie awake at night, thinking of you, till I 
grow dizzy with my own delirious joy. What have I done 
to merit it — or 2 /ow? Sometimes I almost tremble; I am 
so afraid it should not last I” 

“My darling, I am grieved at that,” said Sabretasche, 
fondly. “I would not have one shadow rest on your life 
if I could help it. I have had too much shadow on my 
own not to guard yours from even the most fleeting cloud. 
The regret and sorrow of twenty years have been banished 
off my heart in our present joy ; no fear or pain must enter 
yours, so young and bright. While we both live, my dearest, 
our happiness must last. Yery soon, no power on earth 
can separate us, and we shall never part even for an hour 
— a moment. Yery soon our lives will be as one, Yiolet — 
our happiness must last !” 

“Does Miss Tressillian live alone with an old nurse, 
Major De Vigne?” Lady Molyneux was asking, in that 
voice which was languor and superciliousness embodied. 
“ How very queer — so young a girl I To be sure, she is 
only an artist I Artists are queer people, generally. Still, 
it is very odd 1” 

“Artists, like other people, must live ; and if they have 
happened to have lost their parents, they cannot live with 
them, I presume,” responded De Yigne, dryly. The 
Yiscountess had always an irritating effect upon his 
serves. 

“No, of course not; still, there are plenty of places 
where a girl can take refuge that are most irreproachable 
■ — a school, for instance. She would be much better, I 
should fancy, as a teacher, or a ” 

“She hapj>ens to be a lady,” interrupted De Yigne, 


ORAN’VILLE DE VIGNE. 


419 


quietly, “and nurtured in as much luxury and refinement 
as your daughter.” 

“Indeed!” said the Viscountess, with a nasty sneer and 
upraised eyebrows. “ Pray, is she quite a — quite a proper 
person for Violet to visit 

De Vigne’s slumbering wrath roused up; every vein 
glowed with righteous anger and scorn for the pharisaic 
peeress, of whose own undercurrents he knew a story or 
two not quite so spotless as might have been, and he looked 
down at her steadily and contemptuously. 

“ Lady Molyneux, if the ladies your daughter meets in 
our set at court and drawing-rooms, balls and operas, — if 
they, the immaculate Cordelias and Lucretias of English 
matronage, could lay claim to half as pure a life, and half 
as pure a heart, as the young girl you are so ready to sus- 
pect and to condemn, it might be better for them and — for 
their husbands 1” 

It was a more outspoken, and, in this case, more per- 
sonal, speech than is customary to the bland reserve and 
reticence customary in “good society,” where we may sin, 
but may not say we do, and where it is only permitted to 
ridicule or blackguard our friends behind their backs. The 
Viscountess reddened under her delicate rouge, and turned 
with a laugh to Vane Castleton. The white gate and dark 
thatched gables of St. Crucis Farm were now close at 
hand, and De Vigne rode forward. 

“What a picturesque place!” cried Violet, dropping her 
reins on her mare’s neck. “Oh, Vivian, do look at those 
little lovely yellow chickens, and that great China rose 
climbing all over the house with the honey-snckle, and veri- 
table lattice windows, and that splendid black cat in the 
sunshine! Wouldn’t you like to live here?” 

Sabretasche shook his head, and would have crossed 
himself had he been a Catholic : 


420 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ My dear Yiolet I Heaven forefend I I cannot say 1 
should.” 

‘‘Nor she either,” laughed De Yigne. “She will be 
much more in her element in its neighbor, your luxurious 
Dilcoosha.” 

Sabretasche smiled, Yiolet’s delicate color deepened, to 
vie with the China roses she admired, while the Colonel 
lifted her from her saddle close to the objects of her attach- 
ment, the little lovely yellow chickens, certainly the pret- 
tiest of all new-born things, humiliatingly pretty beside 
the rough ugliness of new-born man, who piques himself 
on being lord of all created creatures; God knows why, 
except that he is slowest in development and quickest in 
evil I 

Certainly the old farm-house looked its best that day ; 
the gray stone, the black wooden porch, the dark thatch, 
with its somber lichens, that had all appeared so dark 
and dreary in the dim February light in which we first saw 
them, were only antiquated and picturesque in the full 
glow of the June sunlight. The deep cool shadows of the 
two great chestnut-trees beside it, with their large leaves 
and snowy pyramidal blossoms, the warm colors of the 
China roses and the honey-suckles against its walls, of the 
full-blossomed apple-trees, and the fragrant lilacs — those 
delicate perfumy boughs that Horace Walpole, the man of 
wit and gossip, courts and salons, patches and powder, 
still found time to love — gave it the picturesqueness and 
brightness which charmed Yiolet at first sight; for not 
more different is the view of human life in youth and age 
than the view of the same place in summer and winter. If 
our life were but all youth ! if our year were but all 
summer 1 

Out of the wide, low lattice window of her own room, 
half shadowed by the great branches of the chestnut-trees, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


421 


with their melange of green and white, yet with the full glow 
of the golden morning sunbeams, and the rose-hued reflex 
of the China roses upon her. Little Alma was leaning as 
we alighted. Like her home, she chanced to look her 
prettiest and most picturesque that day, (she was journal- 
iere — expressive faces that chiefly depend upon animation 
and refined intelligence always are;) she was dressed in 
what Boughton Tressillian had always liked best to see her, 
what she had worn in the hot season at Lorave, and still 
wore in the warm weather here, in something very white 
and gossamer-like, with blue ribbon round her waist, while 
her golden hair, without anything on it, or any perceivable 
means of holding it up, made a sunny framework for her 
face. She was a pretty picture shrined in the dark chestnut- 
boughs and the glowing flowers — a picture which we could 
see, though she could not see us. 

“Is that Alma Tressillian? How lovely she is I” cried 
Yiolet, enthusiastically. 

Sabretasche, thinking of her alone, smiled at her ecsta- 
sies. The Viscountess raised her glass with supercilious 
and hypercritic curiosity. Vane Castleton did the same, 
with the look in his eyes that he had given the night before 
to the very superior ankles of a new danseuse. De Yigne 
caught the look — by George I how his eyes flashed — and 
ho led the way into the house, sorely wrathful within him. 
Alma’s innate high breeding never showed itself more than 
now when she received her unexpected influx of visitors. 
The girl had seen no society, had never been “finished,” 
nor taught to “give a reception;” yet her inborn self- 
possession and tact never deserted her, and if she had been 
brought up all her days in the salons of the Tuileries or 
St. James, it would have been impossible to show more 
calm and winning grace than she did at this sudden inroad 
on the conventual solitude of her studio. Yiolet and she 

36 


VOL. I. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


422 


fraternized immediately; it was no visit from a fashionable 
beauty to a friendless artist, for Yiolet was infinitely too 
much of a lady not to recognize the intuitive aristocracy 
which in the Little Tressillian was so thoroughly stamped in 
blood and feature, manner and mind, and would have sur- 
vived all adventitious circumstances or surroundings. 
There was a certain resemblance which we had often no- 
ticed between them in their natures, their vivacity, their 
perfect freedom from all affectations. Violet’s manner, 
when she chose, was soft and sweet enough to have melted 
the Medusa into amiability; Alma’s vivacity and that sense 
of power, strong as it is modest, which the sense of genius 
always confers, especially where, as in her case, it is backed 
by talent of a high order in many other things, prevented 
her ever knowing such a thing as shyness, and (now that 
she had been relieved of all jealousy of her by De Yigne’s 
information that Violet was engaged to the Colonel) she 
had returned to her old admiration and inclination for the 
brilliant belle who had picked up her sketches on the pave 
of Fall Mall. 

The Viscountess sat down on a low chair in a state of 
supercilious apathy. She cared nothing for pictures. 
The parrot’s talk, which was certainly very voluble, made 
her head ache, and Vane Castleton was infinitely too full 
of admiration of Alma to please her ladyship. De Vigne, 
when he had done the introductory part of the action, 
played with Sylvio, only looking up when Alma addressed 
him, and then answering her more distantly and briefly 
'han his wont. He could have shot Castleion with great 
pleasure for the free glance of his bold light eyes, and such 
a murderous frame of mind rather spoils a man for society, 
however great he may generally be as a conversationalist I 

We, however, managed to keep up the ball of talk very 
gayly, even without him. It was chiefly, of course, upon 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


423 


art — turning; on Alnla’s pictures, which drew warm praises 
from Violet and Castleton, and, wliat was much more, 
from that most fastidious critic and connoisseur, the Col- 
onel, partly, I dare say, to please his fiancee, but partly be- 
cause they really were wonderfully clever, and he thought 
them so. We were in no hurry to leave. Castleton evi- 
dently thought the chevelure doree charming ; women were 
all of one class to him — all to be bought ; some with higher 
prices and some with lower, and he drew no distinction 
between them, except that some were blondes and some 
brunes. Violet seemed to like leaning against the old oak 
window-seat scenting the roses, chatting with Alma, and 
listening to Sabretasche’s classic and charming disquisi- 
tions upon art, and Alma herself was in her element with 
these highly-bred and highly-educated people. We were 
in no hurry to go ; but Lady Molyneux was, and was much 
loo bored to stay there long. 

“You will come and see me?” said her daughter, hold- 
ing out her hand to Alma. “ Oh yes, you must. Mamma, 
is not Thursday our next soiree ? Miss Tressillian would 
like to meet some of those celhbres, I am sure; and they 
would like to see her, for every one has admired her ‘ Louis 
Dix-sept’ so much. Have you any engagement?” 

Of course Alma had none. She gave a glance at De 
Vigue, to see if he wished her to go, but as he was ab- 
sorbed in teaching Sylvio to sit on his hind legs and hold 
his riding-whip on his nose, she found no responsive glance, 
and had to accept it without consulting him. Violet 
taking acceptance for granted, and her mamma, who did 
not care to contradict her before Sabretasche, and intended 
to reprimand her in private for her ridiculous folly in 
taking up this little orphan, joining languidly in the invi- 
tation, the Little Tressillian stood booked for the Thurs- 
day soiree in Lowndes Square. 


424 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Violet bade her good-by with that suave warmth which 
fashionable life could never ice out of her, and the Vis- 
countess swept out of the room, and down the garden, in 
no very amiable frame of mind. She rather affected 
patronizing artistes of all kinds, and had brought out 
several proteges, though she unhappily had dropped them 
as soon as their novelty had worn off; but to patronize an 
artiste of nineteen, whose face Vane Castleton admired, 
was a very different matter, for my lady was just now as 
much in love as she had ever been in love with anything, 
except herself, and there is no passion more exigeant and 
tenacious than the fancy of a woman passee herself for a 
young and handsome man I De Vigne was a little behind 
the rest as he left the room, and Alma called him back, her 
face full of the delight that Violet’s invitation had given 
her. 

“ Oh, Sir Folko I I am so happy. I shall be in your set 
at last. Was it not kind of Miss Molyneux?’^ 

^‘Very kind indeed,” 

“Don’t you like me to go?” 

“I? What have I to do with it? On the contrary, I 
think you will enjoy yourself very much.” 

“You will be there, of course?” 

“I don’t know. Perhaps.” 

“Oh, you will,” cried Alma, plaintively. “You would 
jiot spoil all my pleasure, surely? I do so long to see you 
3n your own society. Only mind you don’t talk to any one 
so much as you do to me I” 

“Nonsense!” said De Vigne, half laughing malgr^ lui. 
“Grood-by, petite, I must go.” 

“ But why have you spoken so little to me this morning ?” 
persisted Alma. 

“You have had plenty of others to talk to you,” said 
De Vigne, coldly. “At least, you have seemed very well 
amused.’- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


425 


Sir Folko, that is very cruel,” cried Alma, vehemently. 
“You know, as well as I can tell you, that if you arc not 
kind to me, all the world can give me no pleasure. You 
^now that there is no one I care to talk to compared with 
you.” 

“Nonsense I Good-by, petite,” said De Vigne, hastily, 
but kindly, for his momentary irritation had passed, as he 
swung through the garden and threw himself across his 
horse. 

“ What a little darling she is, Vivian I” said Violet, as 
they cantered along the road. “Don’t you think so?” 

Sabretasche laughed. 

“ Really, my pet, I did not notice her very much. There 
is but one ‘darling’ for me now.” 

“Deuced nice little thing that!” said Castleton to me; 
“uncommonly pretty feet she has; I caught sight of one 
of them. I suppose she’s De Vigne’s game, bagged al- 
ready, probably, else, on my honor, I shouldn’t mind de- 
throning Coralie and promoting her. French women have 
such deuced extravagant ideas.” 

I believe if De Vigne had heard him he would have 
knocked Castleton straight off his horse. His cool way 
of disposing of Alma irritated even me a little, and I told 
him, a trifle sharply, that I thought he had better call on 
his “honor” to remember that Miss Tressillian was a lady 
by birth and by education, and that she was hardly to be 
classed with the Coralies of our acquaintance. To which 
Castleton responded with a shrug of his shoulders and a 
twist of his blond whiskers : 

“Bless your soul, my dear fellow, women are all alike I 
Never knew either you or De Vigne scrupulous before;” 
and rode on with the Viscountess, asking me, with a sneer, 
if I was “the Major’s game-keeper.” 

De Vigne was very quick to act, but he was unwilling 
36 * 


426 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


to analyze. It always fidgeted him to reason on, to dis. 
sect, and to investigate his own feelings ; he was not cold 
enough to sit on a court-martial on his own heart, to cut 
it up and put it in a microscope, like Gosse over a trog 
or a dianthis, or to imitate De Quincey’s rafl&ne habit of 
speculating on his own emotions. He was utterly incapa- 
ble of laying his own feelings before him, as an anatomist 
lays a human skeleton, counting the bones, and muscles, 
and points of ossification, it is true, but missing the flesh, 
the coloring, the quick flow of blood, the warm moving 
life which gave to that bare skeleton all its glow and 
beauty. De Yigne acted, and did not stop to ask himself 
why he did so nine times out of ten ; therefore he never 
inquired, or thought of inquiring, why he had experienced 
such unnecessary and unreasonable anger at Castleton and 
Alma, but only felt remorsefully that he had lacked kind- 
ness in not sympathizing with the poor child in her very 
natural delight at her invitation to Lowndes Square. 
Whenever he thought he had been unkind, if it were to a 
dog, he was not easy till he had made reparation ; and not 
stopping to remember that unkindness from him might be 
the greater kindness in the end, he sent her down on Thurs- 
day morning as exquisite a bouquet as the pick of Covent 
Garden could give him, clasped round with two bracelets 
as delicate in workmanship as they were rare in value, with 
a line, “ Wear them to-night in memory of your grandfather’s 
friendship for ‘Sir Folko.’” 

Dear old fellow, (true heart and loyal friend; my blood 
always warms when I think of him or write his name I) 
Granville De Yigne’s warm virtues led him as often into 
temptation as other men’s cold selfishness or vice. When 
he sent that bouquet with his bracelets to the Little Tres- 
sillian, despite his passionate nature and his wild life, I 
am certain he had no deeper motive, no other thougiit, 


GRANVILLE DE VIONE 


427 


than to make reparation for his unkindness, and to give 
her as delicately as he could ornaments he knew that she 
must need. With him no error was fore-planned and pre- 
meditated. He might have slain you in a passion perhaps, 
but he could never have stilettoed you in cold blood. 
There was not a taint of malice or design, not a trace of 
the “serpent nature” in his sweet and generous, frank and 
placable, though fiery and impatient character. My Ores- 
tes has always been very dear to me since the first day I 
saw our senior pupil at Frestonhills. God bless him I 
There must be great good in a man, even though the world 
ostracized and damned him ever so determinedly, who could 
make another man love him so truly and so well. 


PART THE FIFTEENTH. 

I. 

low THE OLDEN DELIRIUM AWOKE LIKE A GIANT FROM 
HIS SLUMBERS. 

The Molyneux rooms in Lowndes Square were full; 
not crowded, the Viscountess knew too. well the art of 
society to cram her apartments, as is the present habitude, 
till lords and ladies jostle and crush one another like so 
many Johns and Marys crowding before a fair — the rooms 
were full, and “ brilliantly attended,” as the morning pa- 
pers had it next day, for though they were of the fourth 
order of nobility, the Molyneux had as exclusive a set 
as any in town, and knew “everybody.” “Everybody I” 
Comprehensive phrase I meaning, in their lips, just the 
creme de la creme and nothing whatever below it; mean- 


42S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ing, in a Warden’s, all his Chapter; in a school-girrs, all 
her school-fellows; in a leg’s, all the “ossy-men;” in an 
author’s, those who read him; in a painter’s, those who 
praise him; in a rector’s, those who testimonialize and 
saint him I In addition to the haute volee of fashion there 
was the haute voice of intellect at the Viscountess’s soiree, 
for Lady Molyneux dearly loved to have a lion, (though 
whether a writer who honors the nations, or an Eastern 
prince in native ugliness and jewelry, was perhaps imma- 
terial to her !) and many of our best litt><^rateurs and artists 
were not only acquaintances of hers, bni. intimate friends 
of Sabretasche’s, who at any time threw over the most 
aristocratic crush for the simplest intellectual reunion, pre- 
ferring, as he used to say, the God-given cordon of Brain 
to the ribbons of Bath or Garter. 

The rooms were full, the guests brilhVnt and well as- 
sorted; there were Garcia, and Grisi, and Gardoni in the 
music-room ; there was dancing in the be^ll-roora for in- 
veterate waltzers like Curly or Violet; and in the drawing- 
rooms there was, rarest of all — though gocd singing and 
good waltzing are rare enough, in all consrience. Heaven 
knows I — there was good conversation, conversation worthy 
the name, with (mirabile dictu! in these d?-ys of didactic 
commonplace, and wit, God save the mark ’ heavy as a 
Suffolk cart-horse) repartee and discussion thnt would not 
have disgraced the charming evenings at Madame de 
Sable’s, or the circles at Strawberry Hill -and Holland 
House. 

I went there early, leaving a dinner-party in Eaton 
Square sooner than perhaps I should have done, from a 
trifle of curiosity I felt to see how the “Little Trepsillian” 
comported herself in her new sphere ; and I confes^^ I did 
not expect to see her quite so thoroughly at home, and 
quite so much of a star in her own way as I found her to be. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


429 


I have told you she had nothing of Yiolet’s regular and 
perfect beauty — regular as a classic statue, perfect as an 
exquisitely- tinted picture — yet, someway or other, Alma 
told as well in her way as the lovely Irish belle in hers; 
told even better than the Lady Ela Ashburnington, our 
modern Medici Venus — but who, alas I like the Venus, 
never opens those perfectly-chiseled lips ; or the exquisite 
Mrs. Tite Delafield, — whose form would rival Canova’s 
Pauline, if it weren’t made by her couturihre; or even 
Madame la Duchesse de la Vieillecour, now that — ah me I 
— the sweet rose bloom is due to Palais Royal shops, and 
the once innocent lips only breathe coquetries studied before- 
hand, while her maid brushes out her long hair, and Gwen 
—pshaw I Madame la .Duchesse — glances alternately from 
the Lys de la Vallee to her miroir face et nuque. 

Yes, Alma won upon all; whether it was her freshness, 
whether it was her natural abandon, whether it was her 
unusual talent, wit, and gay selLpossession, (for if there 
is a being on earth whom I hate ’tis Byron’s “bread-and- 
butter miss,”) I must leave. Probably, it was that name- 
less something which one would think Mephistopheles him- 
self had given some women, so surely and so unreasoningly 
do we go down before it, whether we will or no. The 
women sneered at her, and smiled superciliously, but that 
was of course 1 See two pretty women look at each other 
— there is defiance in the mutual regard, and each thinks 
in her. own heart, “ Je vais me frotter contre Wellington !” 
One might have imagined that those high-bred beauties, 
with their style and their Paris dress, their acknowledged 
beauty, and their assured conquests, could well have spared 
poor little Alma a few of the leaves out of their weighty 
bay wreaths. Yet I believe in my soul they grudged her 
even the stalks, and absolutely condescended to honor her 
with a sneer (surest sign of feminine envy) when they saw 


430 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


not only a leaf or two, but a good many garlands of ro86 
and myrtle going to her in the Olympian game of “Shin- 
ing.” Yiolet, the only woman I ever knew without a trace 
of envy or spite, occupied though she pardonably was with 
her own happiness, had taken care to circulate Alma’s iden- 
tity with the artist of the “Louis Dix-sept;” she had inter- 
ested one or two of the Academicians (kind as your really 
“grands homraes” generally are to tyros) about her, and 
had introduced to her some of the “nicest men,” according 
to Violet’s idea of our niceness, which was, I dare say, ac- 
cording to our capabilities for intellectual conversation. So 
started, Alma was quite capable of holding her own, and of 
coming in at the distance with the best of them, and when 
I entered the ball-room I saw the little lady leaning on 
Curly’s arm, after a galope with him, laughing and talking 
with him and half a dozen men — among them Castleton. Her 
own innate good taste had led her to dress solely in white, 
with a few white flowers and dark myrtle leaves laid on her 
golden hair ; De Vigne’s emeralds, flashing in the gas-lights, 
her sole ornaments. There was something uncommonly pic- 
turesque in her appearance; rooms filled like the Moly- 
neux’ were no slight test; but her extreme animation of 
feature, vivacity of manner, and ready wit — always to the 
point, but always spoken softly, merrily, laughingly, as if 
even the keen satire the Little Tressillian could on occa- 
sion deal out only came from the superabundance of her 
quick intelligence and joyous spirits — attracted all the 
men round her, if only in surprise at a new study, and 
gratitude to that “deuced amusing little thing” for a 
fresh sensation. 

Alma, like all brilliant and lively women, enjoyed shin- 
ing, and scintillating, and winning the admiration she was 
born to create. I would as soon, entre nous, believe in a 
child not liking bonbons, or in a jockey not caring to win 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB. 


431 


the Goodwood Cup, as I would believe in a woman not 
liking admiration — if she can get it ! Perhaps but for her 
whole-hearted admiration for De Vigne, after whose epi- 
grammatic talk and original character all men seemed very 
naturally to her fade, spiritless, and commonplace, Alma 
might have been a coquette — if you can fence well it were 
hard to hang up the foils all your days I 

I could not say Alma was the belle of the rooms, because 
Violet Molyneux was that wherever she went; and had 
Violet been absent. Lady Ela, and Mrs. Tite, and Madame 
de la Vieillecour, aforesaid, must in justice have won the 
golden apple long before her — those three superb and royal 
beauties, with their pearls and their diamonds, their dentelle 
and their demi-trains, their usage du monde and their skill- 
ful flirtations; but Alma had more men round her than any 
other, I can assure you — Violet, to a certain extent, being 
tacitly left to the Colonel. An R. A. complimented Alma 
on her wonderful talent, a cabinet minister smiled at her 
repartee, a great litterateur exchanged mots with her, 
Curly fell more deeply in love with her than ever, Castle- 
ton was rapturous about her feet and ankles, very blas6 
men about town went the length of exciting themselves to 
ask her to dance, and Guardsmen warmed into stronger 
admiration than their customary nil admirari-\s,m usually 
permitted, about her. Yet she bent forward to me, as I 
approached her, with a very eager whisper: 

“On, Captain Chevasney I isn’t Sir Folko — Major De 
Vigne — coming 

I really couldn’t tell her, as I had not seen him all day, 
save for a few minutes in Pall Mall ; and the dreadful dis- 
appointment on her face was exceedingly amusing. But a 
minute afterward her eyes flashed, the color deepened in 
her cheeks. 

“ There he is I” she said, with an under-breath of delight 


432 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


And her attention to Curly, and Castleton, and the other 
men, began to wander considerably. 

There he was, leaning against the doorway, distinguish- 
able from all around him by the stately set of his head 
and the “grand air” for which he had always been re- 
markable, even from his boyish days at Frestonhills. He 
looked bored, I was going to say, but that is rather too 
affected a thing, and not earnest nor ardent enough for 
any feeling of De Yigne’s ; it was rather the look of a man 
too impatient and too spirited for the quiet trivialities 
around him, who would prefer “fierce love and faithless 
war” to drawing-room flirtations and polite character — 
damning; the look of a horse who wants to be scenting 
powder and leading a charge, and is ridden quietly along 
smooth downs where nothing is stirring, with a curb which 
he does not relish. Ostensibly, he was chatting with a 
member of the Lower House ; absolutely, he was watch- 
ing Alma with that dark haughty look in his eyes, caused, 
I think, by a certain peculiarity of dropping the lashes half 
over them when he was angry, which made me fancy he was 
not over-pleased to see the men crowding round the little 
lady. 

“He won’t come and speak to me. Do go and ask him 
to come, Captain Chevasney I” whispered Alma, confiden- 
tially, to me. 

I laughed — he had not been more than three minutes in 
the room I — and obeyed her behest. 

“Your little friend wants you to go and talk to her, De 
Yigne.” 

He glanced toward her: 

“ She is quite as well without any attention from me, 
considering the reports that have already risen concerning 
us, and she seems admirably amused as it is.” 

“ Halloa ! are we jealous ?” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


433 


Jealous I Of what, pray asked my lord with supremo 
scorn. 

And moving across the room at once in Alma’s direction, 
(without thinking of it, I had suggested the very thing to 
send him to her, wayward fellow as he was, in sheer de- 
fiance,) he joined the group gathered round the attractive 
Little Tressillian, whose rad*iant smile at his approach 
made Castleton sneer, and poor Curly swear sotlo voce 
under his silky blonde moustache. De Yigne, however, 
did not say much to her; he shook hands with her, said 
one or two things about the celebres to whom she had been 
introduced, and talking with Tom Severn (whom Alma’s 
chevelure doree had attracted to her side) about the pigeon- 
match at Hornsey Wood that morning, left the little lady 
so much to the other men, that Alma, though he was within 
a yard of her, thought she preferred him infinitely more in 
her studio at St. Crucis than in the crowded salons of that 
“set” of his in which she had so wished to meet him. 

The band began again one of D’Albert’s most spirited 
waltzes, and Tom Severn whirled the Little Tressillian, 
according to engagement, into the circle, Alma giving De 
Vigne a very sad, reproachful glance as she went off on 
Tom’s arm. De Vigne did not see it, or would not seem 
to see it, and leant against a console, talking to Madame 
de la Vieillecour ; Grwen Brandling had loved a waltz as 
genuinely and gayly as a young debutante could ; Madame 
la Duchesse scarcely thought it stately enough, reserved it 
only as a most immeasurable favor, and generally preferred 
refusing some dozen aspirants, and retaining them to flirt 
with round her sofa. But though he and madame talked 
very rapidly in French on all sorts of subjects and of 
numbers of mutual Paris friends, I do not fancy that the 
Duchess’s fine eyes received the attention from him that 
did Alma’s goiden- haired head, white cloud-like dress, and 

VOL. I 37 2c 


434 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the little feet which had won Castleton’s admiration, and 
which showed to perfection, long though her dress might 
be, as Severn whirled her round in the delicious, voluptu* 
ous, rapid waltz — that natural, entrancing, and Greek-lik« 
dance, of which I am not even yet blase, nor shall be till 1 
have the gout. 

De Vigne talked to Madame de la Yieillecour, but he 
watched the Little Tressillian, who danced as lightly and 
as gracefully as a Spanish girl or an Eastern bayadere : 
watched her, the fact dawning on him, with a certain 
warning thrill, that she was not, after all, a little thing to 
laugh at, and play with, and pet innocently, as he did his 
spaniel or his parrot, but a woman impassioned, accom- 
plished, fascinating, as dangerous to men as she was at- 
tractive to them, who could no more be trifled with without 
the trifling falling back again upon the trifler than cham- 
pagne can be drunk like water, or absinthe taken to excess 
without harm, or opium eaten long without delirium more 
or less. 

Certain jealousies surged up in his heart, certain embers 
that had slumbered long began to quicken into flame ; the 
blood that he had tried to chill into ice- water rushed 
through his veins with something of its natural rapidity 
and fire. Warnings in plenty were given him that the 
passion which had before cost him so much was not dead 
in him, that the intoxication under w^hich he had so often 
gone down might drown his reason and draw him under its 
delirious pains and raptures yet again. Good Heavens I 
could he think that at five-and-thirty his youth was crushed 
out of him ? — could he hope that while life was still so 
young and feeling strong in him, passion could by any 
possibility have been dead? Warnings in plenty were 
given him, but his old impetuosity and impatience ma<S<t 
him disdain them; and, indeed, in such things warnings 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


435 


ever only serve to hasten what they try to avert. lie had 
pooh-poohed Sabretasche’s earnest and my half-laughing 
counsels; he heeded as little what ought to have roused 
him much more, the throbs of his own heart, and the 
passions stirring into life within him. 

She was a child, he told himself; his own honor was 
guard enough against love growing up between them. So 
he would have said if he had ever reasoned on it. But he 
never, as I have observed, did reason on anything; he was 
not nearly cold or calculating enough for such self-examina- 
tion, and even now, though jealousy was waking up in 
him, he was willfully blind to it and to the irritation which 
the sight of the other men crowding round and claiming 
her excited in him. 

“Don’t you mean to dance with me?” whispered Alma, 
piteously, as he passed her after the waltz was over. 

“I seldom dance,” he answered. 

It was the truth : waltzing had used to be a passion with 
him, but since the Trefusis had waltzed his reason away, 
the dance had brought disagreeable associations with it. 

“But you must waltz with me I” 

“Hush I All the room will hear you,” said De Yigne, 
smiling in spite of himself. “ Let me look at your list, 
then I” 

“ Oh, I would not make any engagements. I might have 
been engaged ten deep. Sir Folko, but I kept them all free 
for you.” 

“May I have the honor of the next waltz with you, 
then. Miss Tressillian ?” asked De Yigne, in a louder tone, 
for the benefit of the people round. 

Of course he got an eager assent, and, leaving her the 
center of her little pro tempo court, he strolled out of the 
ball-room, chatted over the Reform Bill with a Right 
Honorable, who urged him, with all the eloquence of which 


436 


GRANVILLE DE V'IGNE. 


he, an accomplished speaker, was master, to stand for his 
borough in a coming election — an honor De Yigne laugh- 
ingly repudiated: he would lead a charge, he said, with 
pleasure, any day, for his country, but he really could not 
sacrifice himself to wind red tape for the nation. Then 
he strolled on through the other apartments, saying a few 
words to his myriad acquaintances, listened with Sabre- 
tasche and Violet to a duo of Mario and Grisi’s, and went 
back to the ball-room just in time for Alma’s waltz. As 
he put his arm round her, and whirled her into the circle, 
he remembered, with a shudder at the memory, that the 
last woman he had waltzed with was the Trefusis. In 
India wilder sports and more exciting amusements had 
filled his time, and since he had been in England he had 
chiefly frequented men’s society. 

“You had ray note, SirFolko ?” was Almazs first question 
“ I could never thank you for your beautiful gifts, I could never 
tell you what happiness they gave me, what I felt when I 
saw them, how grateful I am for all your kindness, how I 
prize it, how much I would give to be able to repay it I’^ 

“You have said far more than enough, petite,” said De 
Vigne, hastily. 

“Nol” persisted Alma, “I could never say enough to 
mank you for all your lavish kindness to me.” 

“Nonsense,” laughed De Yigne. “I have given brace- 
lets to many other women, Alma, but none of them thought 
they had any need to feel any gratitude to me. The grati- 
tude they thought was due to them for having allowed me 
to offer them the gift I” 

He spoke with something of a sneer, from the memory 
of how — to him, at least — women, high and low, had ever 
been cheap, and worthless as most cheap things are; and 
the words cast a chill over his listener. For the first time 
the serpent entered into Alma’s Eden — entered, as in Mil • 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


431 


ton’s apologue, with the first dawning knowledge of pas- 
sion. Unshed tears sprang into her eyes, making them 
flash and gleam as brilliantly as the jewels in the orna- 
ments he had given her. 

you did not give them from kindness,” she said, 
passionately, “take them back. My happiness in them is 
gone.” 

“Silly child I” said De Yigne, half smiling at her vehe- 
ment tones. “ Should I have given them to you if I had 
not cared to do so? On the contrary, I am always glad 
to give you any pleasure, if I can. But do you suppose, 
Alma, that I have gone all my life without giving bracelets 
to any one till I gave them to you ?” 

Alma laughed, but she looked, half vexed, up in his face 
even still : 

“No, I do not. Sir Folko; but you should not give 
them to me as you gave them to other women, any more 
than you should class me with other women. You have 
told me you did not?” 

“My dear Alma, I cannot puzzle out all your wonderful 
distinctions and definitions,” interrupted De Yigne, hastily, 
half laughing himself. “Have you enjoyed the evening as 
much as you anticipated ?” 

“Oh, it is delightful!” cried the little lady, with that 
quick change of tone, the result probably of the combina- 
tion of vivacity and sensitiveness in her nature which pro- 
duced her rapid alternation from sorrow to mirth, and her 
extreme susceptibility to external impressions. 

De Yigne raised his eyebrows, and interrupted her again, 
somewhat unwarrantably ; 

“You are a finished coquette, Alma.” 

Her blue eyes opened wide under their black lashes : 

“Sir Folko!— I?” 

“Yes, ycu. I am not finding fault with you for it. All 
37 * 


438 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


women are who can be, I only wonder where, in your 
seclusion, you have learned all those pretty wiles and 
ways that women, versed in society from their childhood, 
fail to acquire. Who has taught you all those dangerous 
tricks, from whom have you imitated your skill in captiva- 
ting Curly and Castleton and Severn, and all those other 
men, however different their styles or tastes? You are an 
accomplished flirt, petite, and I congratulate you on your 
proficiency. ” 

He spoke with most unnecessary bitterness, much more 
than he was conscious of, and certainly much more than 
he ought to have used, for the Little Tressillian was just 
as much of a coquette — if you like to call it so — and no 
more of one, than De Yigne in reality liked ; for he pre- 
ferred, infinitely, spirited and attractive women, and, in- 
deed, measured women by their power of fascination. But 
now the devil of jealousy had entered into him unknown to 
himself, and he spoke to her with a cold satirical hauteur, 
such as Alma had never had from him. 

Her eyes flashed, her lips quivered a little; Alma was 
not a woman to sit down tranquilly under injustice ; her 
nature was too passionate not to be indignant under ac- 
cusation, though it was at the same time much too tender 
not to forgive it as rapidly where she loved the offender. 

“For shame. Sir Folko !” she cried, vehemently. Fortu- 
nately the band was far too loud for her voice to be heard 
by the other waltzers, though, as her forehead rested on 
his shoulder while they waltzed, he could catch every word. 
“You are cruelly unjust: you know as well as I do that 
you do not believe what you say, though Heaven knows 
why you say it ! I am not aware that I have any ‘ wiles 
and ways ’ — as you so kindly term them — but I do know 
that no one has ‘taught’ them to me. What I think I 
say; what I feel I tell people* if I am happy, I do not 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


439 


conceal it. I enjoy talking to gentlemen — they are very 
agreeable and very amusing, and I do not think it neces- 
sary to deny it; and I should have trusted you — a man of 
the world who piques himself upon his keen-sightedness — 
to have read me aright. ‘ Coquette I’ I have heard you use 
that word to women you despise. Coquette, I have heard 
you say, means one to whom all men are equal. I thank 
you greatly for your kind opinion of me I” 

“ Hush, hush, Alma I Heaven knows that was far from 
my thoughts! Forgive me, petite; I meant nothing un- 
kind. I know you have no artifices or affectations, and I 
should never attribute them to you. Let nothing I say vex 
you. If you knew all the shams and manoeuvres I have 
come across, you would not wonder that I am skeptical 
and suspicious, and sometimes perhaps unjust.” 

He spoke kindly, gently, almost fondly. He was angry 
with himself for having spoiled her unclouded pleasure. 
She looked up in his face with a saddened, reproachful 
tenderness, which had never been in her eyes before, dif- 
ferent to their impetuous vexation, different still to their 
frank, affectionate confidence ; 

“Yes; but trust me at least. Sir Folko, if you doubt all 
the world 

“I do!” 

He spoke in a low whisper, his moustache touching her 
golden hair, her heart throbbing against his, her breath 
upon his cheek, his hand closing tight upon hers in the 
caress of the waltz, and with the voluptuous swell of the 
music, the tender and passionate light of the eyes that were 
lifted to his, for the first time there awoke, and trembled 
in them both, the dawn of that passion which the one had 
never before known, which to the other had been so fierce 
and fatal a curse. 

At that moment the music ceased. De Yigne gave hei 


440 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


his arm in silence, and soon after seated himself by hef 
on one of the couches, while other men came round her, 
taking ices and talking the usual ball-room chit-chat, and 
the Little Tressillian shone with increased brilliance no\^ 
that her “Sir Folko” was beside her. It was strange how 
much that single evening did for Alma : she was admired, 
courted, followed ; she learnt her own power, she received 
the myrtle crowm due to her own attractions; to the grace 
and talent of Nature she seemed to acquire the grace and 
talent of Society, and to the charming and winning ways 
of her girlhood she added the witchery, wit, and fascina- 
tion of a woman of the world. In that one night she grew 
tenfold more attractive than before; she was like a bird, 
who never sings so well till he has tried his wings. 

She fascinated unconsciously away De Vigne’s reason, 
prudence, and resolves, as woman’s witchery had ever done. 
Without thinking why or wherefore, she bewitched him ; 
without remembering his sage remark to me, that, “con- 
sidering the reports already circulated concerning them, she 
was much better without his attentions,” he gave himself 
up to the influence of the hour. He eclipsed, as he easily 
could. Curly, Castleton, Tom Severn, and all the other 
men; he waltzed with her often, he took her into the 
drawing-room and introduced her to one or two of tno 
most celebrated men present, and talked with her and them 
animatedly, brilliantly, epigrammatically, with that apropos 
wit and keen, polished satire, in which no one, when he 
was in good spirits, could ever surpass De Yigne. 

I do not believe that around Madame de Defifand’s 
fauteuil, or in the salons of Gore House, could have been 
heard more sparkling conversation than that which scin- 
tillated from the group in Lowndes Square drawing-room, 
of which Violet, Madame de la Vieillecour, and the Little 
Tressillian were the center, and round which De Yigne 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


441 


Sabretasche, and several of the beaux espiits and the 
esprits forts of our time were gathered. As great a charm 
as beauty had over his senses, had intellect over De 
Vigne’s mind ; he had never rested till he won the one, he 
would have gone anywhere to find the other. I had always 
thought that if he were ever won through both, he would 
never give up the love, cost him what it might. That 
Alma’s talents were now dazzling him, as the Trefusis’s 
exterior charms, and the charms of many others, had done 
before her, it was easy to see, and there were in his eyes, 
when they dwelt upon her, the mingled softness and fire 
which were sure signs of his olden delirium stealing upon 
him. 

Violet had promised, when at St. Crucis, to send their 
carriage for Alma; but when the time came, her mother 
had snappishly refused to dispatch her roans out on any 
such errand, and Violet had bad recourse to the Colonel, 
begging him to lend her one of his carriages, to enable 
her to keep her promise. Sabretasche, who would have 
fulfilled, or tried to fulfill, the most impossible desires of 
his fiancee, of course consented to so trifling a request, and 
Violet had sent his brougham and her own maid — that 
most good-natured and charming of soubrettes — Justine, 
for the Little Tressillian; for Violet bad one great merit, 
if she did a thing at all she did it well; and in all the 
whirl and gayety of her life she never forgot a promise or 
neglected a kindness. Sabretasche’s brougham was ac- 
cordingly there to take Alma back to Richmond ; and not 
even Lady Ela, or Mrs. Tite, or Madame la Duchesse, had 
more men anxious for the pleasure of taking them to their 
carriages, than the little debutante. Curly’s soft glance 
and words pleaded hard for the distinction ; Tom Severn 
would fain have had it ; Castleton tried hard to give her 
his arm ; but De Vigne kept them all off, and took her 


442 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


down stairs with that tranquil appropriativeness which he 
thought his intimacy with her would warrant. He would 
not have been best pleased if he had heard the laugh and 
the remarks that followed them, from the men that were 
on the staircase watching the women leave. The gas-light 
shone on her bright dark-blue eyes, as she leaned forward 
in the carriage, and put out both her hands to him, his 
emeralds glittering on her white arms, and her face speak- 
ing all that was in her heart. 

“ Sir Folko I if I could but thank you as I feel I” 

“ If I could but prove to you you have nothing to thank 
me fori Would to Heaven that you had I” 

‘‘At least, I have all the happiness that is in my life.” 
“Happiness? Hush I” said He Vigne, passionately. 
“How can you tell but what some day you may hate me, 
loathe me, and wish to God that we had never met?” 

“I?” cried Alma. “O Heaven I no. If I were to die 
by your hand, I would pray with my latest breath that God 
might bless you.” 

“You would? P.oor child I” murmured He Yigne. 
“Alma, good night I” 

“Good night I” 

Those two good nights were very soft and low — spoken 
with a more tender intonation than any words that had 
ever passed between them. His hands closed tightly upon 
hers ; the love of woman, his favorite toy in early youth, 
the stake on which he risked so much in early manhood, 
was beguiling him again. His head was bent so that his 
p lips almost touched her wide arched brow ; perhaps they 
might have touched and lingered there — but, “Way for 
the Duchesse de la Yieillecour’s carriage !” was shouted 
out, the coachman started off his horses, and De Yigne 
stood still beneath the awning, with the bright gas glare 
around and the dark street beyond him, while his heart 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


443 


stirred and his pulses quickened as, since his marriage-day, 
he had vowed they never should again for any woman’s 
sake. 

lie walked home alone, without waiting for his carriage, 
or, indeed, remembering it, smoking his cigar as he paced 
the gray, deserted streets, forsaken in the early morning 
dawn save by a policeman here and there, or some wretched 
women reeling out of a gin-palace, or some groups quit- 
ting a casino with riotous but mirthless laughter. He 
walked home, restless, impatient, ill at ease, with two faces 
before him haunting him as relentlessly as in the phantas- 
magoria of fever — the faces of Constance Trefusis and 
Alma Tressillian — the one with her sensual, the other with 
her intellectual beauty; the one who had destroyed his 
youth, the other who had given it back to him, side by 
side in their startling and forcible contrast, as in the 
Eastern fable the good angel sits on the right shoulder 
and the bad angel on the left, neither leaving us, each pur- 
suing us throughout the day and night. 

Till he reached his home, threw himself on his bed, and 
took some grains of opium, as he had done in India when 
sleep forsook him, both those faces haunted his brain — the 
woman he had made his wife, and the woman who had won 
his love. 


■«1> 0# TOI.. 1. 







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GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 

OR 

HELD IN BONDAGE. 

TOt. II. 



.a t) A. (I K 0 u nr a j a H ^ 

.11 J07 ' ' 






CONTENTS OF VOL. 11. 


TART THE SIXTEENTH. 

I “ Lcs orages sont environnes de beaux jours’\...... .... 6 

II. Park Lane 19 

PART THE SEVENTEENTH. 

I. How Violet IMolyneux translated fidelity 83 

ii. How a woman made feud between Palamon and 
Arcite, and passion awoke tenfold stronger for 
rest 62 

PART THE EIGHTEENTH. 

I. The ordeal by fire 66 

PART THE NINETEENTH. 

I. A bitterness greater than death 89 

II. How we rode in the light cavalry charge 106 

Ul. The bridal jewels go to the Mont de Piet6 124 

PART THE TWENTIETH. 

I. How De Vigne marred his own fate a second time 131 

II. The gazelle in the tiger’s fangs 150 

PART THE TWENTY-FIRST. 

I How Little Alma hovered between life and death 176 

(iii) 


CONTENTS OF VOL. 11. 


PART THE TWENTY-SECOND. 

I. One of those whom England has forgotten 206 

II. How inconstancy was voted » virtue 227 

PART THE TWENTY-THIRD. 

I. All that fidelity cost 246 

PART THE TWENTY-FOURTH. 

1. The wife to whom Sabretasche was bound 286 

PART THE TWENTY-FIFTH. 

I. Release 828 

£1. In the forest of Fontainebleau 347 

PART THE TWENTY-SIXTH. 

£. The temptation of a life S72 

PART THE TWENTY-SEVENTH. 

I. Fidelity 388 

il. Nemesis 396 

PART THE TWENTY-EIGHTH. 

1. How freedom came at last 407 

PART THE TWENTY-NINTH. 

I. Valete 429 

II. Adieu au lecteur 446 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. * 


PART THE SIXTEENTH. 


I. 


“LES ORAGES SONT ENVIRONNES DE BEAUX JOURR.’^ 

The ball at Lady Molyneux’s was on the 25th of June. 
On the day after, just a fortnight before the 10th, which 
was fixed as his marriage-day, Sabretasche gave a fete at 
his Dilcoosha. That exquisite place, which had always 
reminded me of Yathek and of Fonthill, was ten thousand 
times more exquisite now. Little as I notice detail where 
I admire the tout ensemble, and intolerable as I consider 
the fashion of lingering over the modern upholstery in a 
novel, and interspersing the description of Adeliza’s or 
Fitzallan’s harrowing sufferings with that of her Shvres 
and silver cafetiere, or his velvet and gold smoking-cap, I 
must admit that the Dilcoosha was perfect, and I do not 
think Aladdin himself could have improvised a more 
lovely cage for his pet bird than the Colonel had done for 
his. It had been a whim of his to embellish that house in 
every possible way before his engagement; but after it, ho 
seemed to take a perfect delight in making Violet’s home 
as luxurious and as beautiful as his wealth, and his art, and 
his own love of everything graceful and refined could com- 

1* 2d (5) 


6 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


bine io rericlei it. I went over it with him one day, and 
told him that if ever I wanted to do up old Longholme as 
lavishly, I hoped he would come and act as superintendent 
of the works. Certainly, if Violet had married the highest 
peer in the realm, she could not have had a more lovely 
shrine than the Dilcoosha. Regalia’s grim and grand old 
castle in Merionetshire would have looked very dull and 
dark after Sabretasche’s villa, where everything was per- 
fect. The grounds were as wild and luxuriant as any wood- 
land in the heart of the provinces, while yet all the 
resources of horticulture were lavished on them, and their 
cascades and fountains rivaled Chatsworth. The conserv- 
atories excelled even Leila Puffdoflf’s winter-garden, with 
here and there among their glories of blossom and coloring 
a marble group or a single statuette, such as the rifling of 
Parisian, and Florentine, and Roman studios could give 
him. The suite of drawing-rooms opened out of them, a 
soft demi-lumiere streaming through rose-hued glass oa 
the thousand gems of art, the low couches, the buhl cabi- 
nets, mosaic tables, delicate books, statuettes, flowers, 
Dresden figures, that were gathered in them ; the walls 
were hung with white watered silk, looped up here and 
there to show little oval landscapes by some of the first 
French masters, and parted at regular distances for mir- 
rors, that reflected the exotics that clustered at their feet. 
Violet’s morning room, (I hate the word “boudoir;” stock- 
brokers’ Hackney or Peckham villas boast their “bou- 
doirs,” and tradesmen’s wives sit puffing under finery in 
“boudoirs,” while their lords take invoices in white aprons, 
or advertise their “Nonpareil trousers,” their genuine 
Glenlivat, or ne plus ultra coats!) — Violet’s morning 
room was hung in pale green and gold, with a choice 
library of her favorite works collected in quaint medieval 
book-stands, the deep bay-window opening on to the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


7 


foTeliest view the grounds afforded, the walls painted in 
illustration of Lallah Rookh, and the greatest gems the 
house contained in sculpture or in art shrined here in her. 
honor — a room in which, looking out to the fair landscape 
beyond, and back to the rich treasures of art within, one 
fondly felt 

To sit in sunshine calm and sweet, 

It were a world too exquisite 

For man to leave it for the gloom, 

The cold dark shadow of the tomb! 

Her bed-room and her dressing-room rivaled Lady Bless- 
ington’s, and Sabretasche needed all his great wealth to 
adorn them as he did. The bed was of carved ivory, the 
curtains of pink silk and white lace, caught up by a chain 
of flowers, moulded and chased in silver; all the hangings 
of the rooms were pink and silver, while silver lamps 
swung from the ceiling, giving out perfume as they burned. 
It was a home fit for an imperial bride, and though a still 
fairer shrine, and for a purer deity, made me think of Du 
Barry’s Luciennes, where the “very locks of the doors 
were works of art and chefs-d’oeuvre of taste.” Sabretasche 
had such pleasure in beautifying it, for his habitual love of 
art and refinement was in it, blent with his tender love for 
Violet Molyneux, and, if ever a man’s or woman’s idol was 
worthy of the shrine made for them, she merited his lavish 
gifts. 

On the 26th, Sabretasche had a fete at the Dilcoosha, a 
day to be spent, according to Violet’s programme, so that, 
as she said, “she might catch a glimpse of the Summer, 
and forget the Season for an hour or two;” and as the 
Colonel’s Dilcoosha was known to afiord, if anything 
could, the requisites for enjoying a long day, no one, even 
the most ennuye, was bored at the 'prospect, especially 
as his invitations were invariably very exclusive, and I 


8 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


know people who would rush into that quarter where ia 
written — 

Lasciate ogne speranza, o voi ch’entrate, 

if the admissions were exclusive, and would decline Para- 
dise if its golden gates were opened to the multitude. 

We drove down to luncheon there at three, strolled in 
the grounds afterward, listened to the band of the Dashers 
in the open air, to some of the opera artistes in the music- 
room, boated on the river, or flirted and ate ice under the 
perfumy limes, according to custom in such affairs; dined 
at eight, and about eleven found our way to a large marquee 
opening out of the conservatories, decorated in such style 
as Sabretasche was certain to have anything under his 
management done, where our band played waltzes and 
galops till the first rays of morning broke over the sum- 
mer sky. 

There were Lady Ela with her stately beauty, and Mrs. 
Tite Delafield with her divine figure, and Madame de la 
Vieillecour with her courtly coquetries, (so stateful yet so 
skillful, that I have lived to thank God my fair-faced Gwen 
was faithless to her pledge, and that M. PAmbassadeur has 
trusted his name to her — not I;) and there were De Yigne, 
and Curly, and Castleton, and countless others; in a word, 
all who had met the previous evening at the Molyneux’ 
soiree, (except, to be sure, the Little Tressillian, who was 
only half a mile away, but in ignorance of the brilliant 
gathering at the Dilcoosha;) and there was, of course, 
Sabretasche’s fiancee, so soon to be his bride, his wife — 
with the light of love in her brilliant violet eyes, and the 
glories of her coming future in the shadowless beauty of 
her face, which, fair as they were, no woman there could 
rival. 

The luncheon w'as gay and brilliant ; repartee flowed 
with the still Ai, and mots sparkled with the Johannisberg. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


9 


Sabretasche showed nowhere to better advantage than as 
a host; his Chesterfieldian courtesy, his graceful urbanity, 
his careful attention to everybody, and every trifle, above 
all, bis art in starting conversation and drawing people 
out, always made parties at his house more charming than 
at any other; and, delightful as he had ever been in society, 
even when the curse of his bitter secret and his early shame 
was on him, you can fancy how delightful a host the 
Colonel was now that his fate was cloudless and Violet 
Molyneux his guest. 

During the luncheon, De Vigne sat next to Leila Puff- 
dofif, who, as I have before hinted, was willing to make 
more love to him than Granville cared to make to her. 
De Vigne was much set upon by fine ladies, partly for the 
chivalric aroma that hung about him from his campaign in 
Scinde, partly for the distinguished beauty of his face and 
form, and chiefly because he was so haughtily indififerent to 
them, and the romantic circumstances of his early marriage 
rendered him a sort of fruit defendu. The little Countess 
had really fallen in love with him, such love as young 
coquettes like her take — as they take their sal volatile or 
eau de cologne — as a little pleasant excitement ; she flirted 
with him desperately during the luncheon, and made him 
row her on the river afterward, part of the grounds of the 
Dilcoosha sloping downward to the Thames, and drooping 
their willow and larch boughs into the water. De Vigne 
took the sculls, as in duty bound, and rowed her a good 
way down, under the arching branches; but though Lady 
Putfdoff put out all her charms, she could not lure De 
Vigne into anything as warm or tender as sh© would have 
liked; she was piqued — possibly what he wished to make 
her — bid him scull her back to the Dilcoosha, and, as soon 
as she was landed, went off to listen to Gardoni, with 
Crowndiamonds, Castleton’s eldest brother, and a whole 


10 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


troop of minor soupirants following and crowding round 
her. De Vigne was profoundly thankful to be released; 
he had a fancy to leave all these people and scenes, which 
were so stale to him and bored him to-day, though usually 
he was excessively fond of society, and to go and see Alma 
Tressillian, feeling a certain irresistible desire to have that 
little hand again in his, and hear the voice that had whis- 
pered him so soft a good night. 

He knew the way by the river to St. Crucis, and turning 
from the gay party scattered over the picturesque grounds 
of the Dilcoosha, gathered in such groups as would have 
done for Boccaccio’s stories or Watteau’s pictures, he took 
the oars of the little boat which the Countess had just 
vacated, and pulled himself up the river to a point where 
he knew a path led to the farm-house, as he had once or 
twice walked down to the bank with Alma by it, and rowed 
her a mile or so on the water, amused with her amuse- 
ment in seeing those steamers, barges, and cockle-shell 
boats in which Cockneys love to disport themselves on 
that certainly pretty, but, alas I how unodoriferous a stream. 

He moored the boat to the bank, thinking of the care- 
less days when he had pulled up the river with the Eton 
Eight, enjoying the glories of success at the Brocas and 
Little Surley with all the wild spirit and unsaddened ardor 
of boyhood, and walked onward to St. Crucis, with that 
swinging cavalry step which had beaten many good pedes- 
trians and stalwart mountain guides in both hemispheres. 
He strode along, too,’ to uneasy thoughts ; he was con- 
scious of a keener desire to see the Little Tressillian than 
he would confess to himself, and, at the same time, he had 
a remorseful conviction that it might be better to stay 
away, a suggestion to which he was equally reluctant to 
listen. A quarter of an hour brought him in sight of St 
Crucis; but with that sight he 'saw, too, what gave him ro 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


II 


remarkable pleasure — Curly, who had apparently forsaken 
the Dilcoosha for the same purpose as himself. Curly 
had just pushed open the gate and entered — entered as if 
he liked his destination; and De Yigne paused a moment 
behind him, under the road-side trees, wavering in his 
mind whether he should follow him or not. Where he 
stood he could see the garden, in all its untrained yet pro- 
fuse summer beauty ; the great chestnuts, with their green 
umbrageous boughs and snowy clustering blossoms, that 
the soft wind was scattering over the turf beneath them ; 
and under the trees, on a rough bench, with her little black 
hat on her lap, and her palette and sketching-block at her 
feet, he saw Alma Tressillian, and beside her, bending 
eagerly forward, Vane Castleton. He, too, then, had left 
Sabretasche’s fete to find his way after Alma I “Curse 
the fellow!” swore De Yigne, “how dare he come after 
her here ?” If he had followed his instinct and his long- 
ing, he would have taken Castleton up by his coat-collar 
and kicked him out of the garden like a dog; though 
probably, for that matter, Castleton had as much right 
there as himself. 

Curly had pushed open the gate and entered, and Alma, 
catching sight of him as he went across the garden, sprang 
up, left Castleton rather unceremoniously, and came to 
meet him with a glad greeting, and something of that gay, 
bright smile which De Yigne liked to consider his own and 
his unshared property. Curly answered it with an air 
more tender than mere compliment, and sat down beside 
her, giving Castleton such a glance as a man only gives to 
a rival who has forestalled him. 

De Yigne took in the whole scene at a glance, and con- 
strued it as his skepticism and his knowledge of women 
Buggested to him. The darker passions of his character 
rose up; the devil of jealousy entered into him; he turned 


12 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


away in one of those moments of haughty anger and hot 
impatience which had sometimes cost him as much in one 
way as softer passions in another. 

“ She is a thorough-paced coquette, like all the rest,’’ 
he thought. “I will not add another to the fools who 
pander to her vanity.” 

He swung round and retraced his steps, leaving Alma 
sitting under her favorite chestnut-trees with Castleton and 
Curly. It cut him to the soul that those men should be 
near her, having her smiles, looking in her eyes, teaching 
her the power, and, with the power, the artifices of her sex, 
gaining — who could say they would not? — one or other 
of them — their way into her heart I He was mad with 
himself for the jealousy he felt; and fiercely and futilely 
he tried to persuade himself, tried till at last he succeeded, 
that it was but his annoyance at finding Alma no more 
truthful or reliable than the rest of her sex, and his regret 
at the inevitable fate which would await Boughton Tressil- 
lian’s adopted child if she listened to the love of Vane 
Castleton, or even of Curly; for Curly, though frank- 
hearted and honorable as a man could be, was young, wild, 
and held women lightly, as men of his age do. 

All the fire — at all times more like a Southern than an 
English temperament — which lay asleep under the armor 
of ice which he had put on to guard himself from a sex 
that had wronged him, was stirred and kindled into flame. 
He might as yet seek to give them and conceal them to 
himself under other names, but at work within were his old 
foes — jealousy and passion. The gay glitter of society, as 
he joined a group under the fragrant limes of the Dilcoo- 
sha, where Yiolet, the Puffdoflf, Madame de la Yieillecour, 
and others, were competing in skill as Toxopholites for 
some of the loveliest prizes Sabretasche had rifled from 
Howell and James’s stores, seeined strangely at variance 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


13 


with the tempest working up in his heart; and while he 
smiled and jested with the women there, he could not for* 
get for one instant the Little Tressillian, as he had left her 
sitting under the great chestnut-boughs smiling on Curly 
arid Yane Castleton. It was a far greater relief to him 
than he would own to himself, when not long afterward he 
saw Castleton discussing the merits and demerits of her 
bow with Ela Ashburnington ; and in half an hour’s time, 
or a trifle more, heard Curly chatting frothy badinage 
with empty-headed and sylph-waisted Mrs. Tite Delafield, 
though, following the dictates and bias of his nature, there 
was no bodily injury he could not have found it in his heart 
to wreak upon them both, eveu on his old Frestonhills pet, 
for having won those gay bright smiles under the chestnut- 
trees at St, Crucis. 

He would scarcely have been less wrathful if be had 
heard Crowndiamonds saying to his brother, 

“Where the deuce have you been to, Yane? Helena 
sent me to look for you, but I couldn’t find you any- 
where.” 

“ I was after something far prettier than the old woman,” 
was Castleton’s recherche reply. 

“ Helena” was nobody less than my Lady Molyneux, with 
whom this noble scion of the House of Tiara had been lie, 
according to on dits, in a closer friendship than Jockey 
Jack would have relished had he not been taught to take 
such friendships as matters of course. 

“I’ve been to see that little girl Tressillian — called to 
look at her pictures, of course ; studios are deuced nice 
excuse, by Jove 1” 

And Lord Yane curled his whiskers and laughed at 
some joke not wholly explained. 

“What, that little thing that was at Helena’s last night,” 
asked Crowndiamonds, “that you and the other fellows 


VOL. II. 


14 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


made 5uc-b a fuss about ? Heaven knows why ! she’s too 
petite for me ; and I can show you a score of ten times 
Sner women in the coulisses any night. Besides, somebody 
said she was De Yigne’s property I” 

“ What if she were ? If he don’t take care of his game, 
other men may poach it, mayn’t they ?” 

The summer day passed away in colors to Yiolet as 
gl:)rious as those that tinged its evening sky when the 
western sun went down behind the limes in its purpureal 
splendor, shrouding the evening star in its refulgence, and 
bathing in its golden glow every spear of grass that glit- 
tered in the dew. Bright as the day was Yiolet’s glad 
enjoyment of it, brilliant as the sunset glories rose her 
present and her future ; secure she felt from the gray 
twilight or the starless night, which overshadow the 
brightest human life not less surely than they overtake 
the fairest summer day. Of twilight taint, much less of 
midnight shadow, Yiolet’s young and cloudless existence 
knew DO fear. I have never seen on earth — not even 
imagined in song nor idealized in art — any face so ex- 
pressive of perfect happiness and brilliant youth as hers. 
When it was in repose there was the light of a smile on 
her lips, and the joyousness of the spirit within seemed to 
linger far down in the sunny depths of her eyes, as on the 
violet waves of the Mediterranean we have seen the gleam 
and the glow of the rays from a sunrise hidden from our 
own view. It made one think of Petrarch’s “lampeggiar 
dell’ angelico riso,” save that Yiolet’s smile was more 
tender and more sure than the evanescent play of light- 
ning; there was something in her face that touched even 
the most blase and cynical among us, and subdued the most 
supercilious or systematic of all those women of the world 
into a vague regret for the spring-time of their days, when 
they, too, were in their beaux jours, and they, too, believed 
in Love and Life. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


15 


*Corarae elle est heureuse !” said Madame de la Yieille- 
cour to me — one of the Dachess’s favorite affectations was 
never speaking her native language — “et elle doit Tetre, 
cher Arthur; elle va epouser celui qu’elle adore I” 

And madame heaved a sigh, as if she, too, might not 
have married where she had said she adored, if she had 
not worshiped more tenderly still the Vieillecour diamonds 
and thirty descents and ambassadorial splendor. 

. “Pardon, madame,” said I, naively; “niais je croyais que 
I’adoration allait a tout le monde, excepte, a I’epoux?” 

Madame colored through her dainty rouge, and sighed 
again. 

“Ah, mon ami, ne vous moquez pas de moi. Yous ne 
concevez pas comment — nous autres femmes — nous sommes 
sacrifices aux prcjnges du monde 1” 

“Mais c’est un holocaust, madame,” laughed I, “comme 
celui de Myrrha, presente de tres bonne volonte I” 

The Duchess was annoyed, and, to punish me, forsook 
sentiment, and coquetted to desperation with a great pet 
of hers, a cousin of M. de la Yieillecour’s, the Marquis de 
Larisse Torallie, over her favorite vanilla ice. 

Perhaps she did regret for a fleeting moment — on the 
universal principle that what we have not must be better 
than what we have — that she had given up her girlish 
dreams for the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, 
pleasant pomps and vanities though they be, and high 
price as the most romantic idealist and the greatest saint 
will alike pay for them. Perhaps so : perhaps the heart 
of Gwen Brandling might not, be wholly dead in the 
Duchess de la Yieillecour, though it was dead to me; and 
if it were not, Yiolet’s fair face might well wake it up, 
stamped on that face as there were a mind beyond the 
glittering bagatelles of her rank, and a love that, like 
Francesca's, would endure in the midst of woe. I think 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


IB 


there were few of us who did not involuntarily wish her 
gladness — none of us who did not afterward remember the 
joyous beauty of Violet Molyneux that night. So brilliant 
and delicate a flower surely the tempest might have spared I 
Sabrotasche, and his young love so soon to be his wife — to 
begin a life that would be to him new youth and to her the 
heaven of her ideal — gave themselves up to the intoxica- 
tion of the hour. Never had either of them been more 
brilliant; never had Violet given freer rein to the joyous 
spirits of her nature; never had he more completely sur- 
rendered himself to the new happiness he had won I He 
loved her with a strangely tender love, intensified by the 
poetry and earnestness, amounting even to melancholy, 
natural to that part of his clvaracter which the world had 
never discovered in its courted and wearied man of fashion 
and of pleasure. He loved her, as we love very rarely, for 

As those who dote on odors pluck the flowers, 

And place them on their breast, but place to die; 

Thus the frail beings we should fondly cherish 

Are laid within our bosoms but to perish. 

He loved her better than himself. Sweet hours they passed 
together that day, fond words they spoke in the perfect 
union of their hearts, glowing ideals of their radiant future 
he whispered to her as, when they escaped unnoticed from 
the crowd, he led her through her own apartments, locked 
to the ingress of others. 

“Ah I Violet, time has leaden wings I” he whispered, in 
the solitude of the conservatories, as the ball drew to a 
close, and her mother waited for her. “A fortnight is not 
long, yet to me, while it keeps you from me, it seems 
eternity I My love, my darling, every moment that we are 
parted is waste of life and loss of happiness. Would to 
God you were mine now I’’ " 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


It 


The soft rose-hue that wavered in her cheeks, the low 
sigh, love’s tenderest interpreter, that parted her lips— 
breathed from the very fullness of her joy, as flowers in the 
noon sunlight droop their heads in ecstasy too great to 
bear — re-echoed his wish, though words were silent. 

“You will love me always?” she whispered; “love me 
like this, Vivian ; never less tenderly, never less warmly, 
never coolly, calmly, chillily, as men learn, they say, to 
love women whom they have won ?” 

“Never, my own love I Indifference, calmness, chill do- 
mestic affection were death to me as to you. My love has 
ever been as passionate as my native Southern suns; for 
you it will be as changeless and eternal.” 

“Then what can part us ?” murmured Violet, lifting her 
face to his, with a smile upon her lips, and in her eyes the 
happiness secure from all terrors and all tarnish — happi- 
ness, tender, cloudless, and triumphant. “No power on 
earth ! And so well do we love, that if death took one, 
he would strike the other !” 

“Hushl” whispered Sabretasche, fondly. “Why speak 
of death or sorrow, my dearest? Our fate is life and joy, 
and life and joy together I We love ; and in that word all 
the passionate happiness earth can know is given to us 
both.” 

He paused, and the silence that is sweeter than any 
words supplied his broken eloquence, stifled by its own joy, 
and Violet’s upraised eyes gave him an answer fuller than 
any words, cold interpreters at best of the heart’s deepest 
ntterances. 

When all his other guests had left the Dilcoosha, Lady 
Molyneux gave him the third seat iu her carriage back to 
town. He needed to return iu time for early parade, and 
the drive gave him an additional hour and a half with 
Violet. The summer dawn was very bright and still. wHh 

2 * 


18 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


not a trace of human life abroad, save some gardeners* 
carts wending their way slowly to Covent Garden with 
their fresh pile of newly-gathered vegetables or fragrant 
load of nodding hot-house flowers — flowers destined to 
wither in the soft, cruel hand of some jeweled beauty, or 
droop and die, pining for their native sunlight, under the 
gmoke-shroud of the Great City, as sweet natures and 
warm hearts shrink or harden under the blight of a chill 
world or the pressure of an uncongenial existence. There 
was no sign of human life, but the birds were lifting up 
their little voices in their morning hymns, sweet gushes of 
natural song, and the dew was sparkling among the daisied 
grass, and the southerly wind was tossing the wayside 
boughs up in its play, and filling the air with a fragrance, 
brought miles and miles on its rapid wings from the free, 
fresh woodlands far away. 

There was a soft sunshiny beauty in the summer dawn 
that chimed sweet cadence with their thoughts as Yiolet 
and Sabretasche drove homeward ; while Lady Molyneux 
— worked throughout the season for fashion*s sake as hard 
as Hood’s poor shirtmaker for very life — slept, though she 
would have denied it, tranquilly and well, muffled in the 
swansdown of her opera-cloak. Yiolet and Sabretasche 
enjoyed the sweet daybreak as people do whose hearts are 
full of gladness; she, with that love of all fair things, and 
that susceptibility to externals natural to youth and to a 
heart that has never yet known care ; he, with that capacity 
for happiness and that poetic keenness to all things beauti- 
ful in life and nature which had in boyhood made the mur- 
mur of the Mediterranean waves, or the setting of the 
Bun, or the sighing of southern winds among the olive- 
groves, sufficient pleasure to his senses, and which had now 
awakened into new life, after long years of artificial glare 
and fashionable excitements, at the touch of real and un- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


19 


selfish love. With the song of the birls, and the gleam 
of the bright morning rays, and the sweep of the fresh west 
wind, their hearts beat in unison and joy. When the future 
is fair to us, how fair looks the green and laughing earth I 
Yiolet looked up in her lover’s eyes ; 

“Oh, Yivian, how beautiful is life 1” 

“ With love !” 

Life and love were both beautiful to him as he whispered 
a farewell but for a few hours in Yiolet’s ear, bent his head 
for one soft though hurried kiss from the lips whose words 
of affection were consecrated as solely to him as their 
caresses, and descended from the carriage at the door of 
his house in Park Lane. God help him I hours of mortal 
anguish waited for him there. 


II. 


PARK LANE. 

It was past six o’clock when he reached his home, and, 
not caring to undress, Sabretasche threw himself down on 
one of the luxurious couches of that favorite room of his 
on the ground-floor, which adjoined and opened into his 
beloved studio, where the morning light, which he had bade 
his servants admit through the half-closed persiennes, fell 
full on his easel, on the portrait of Yiolet Molyneux 
(which he was doing in pastel for her father, the Francesca 
being hung in Yiolet’s morning room at the Dilcoosha) 
which beamed from the canvas with such a radiant, ani- 
mated, spirituelle light upon it, that it was hard to believe 
it was but paper and colored chalks, lie lay full length 
upon the couch, smoking his perfumed narghile, with that 
voluptuous indolence habitual to him — looking- at the pic- 


20 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


tnre where his own art had re-created the beauty of his 
young love — feeling in memory the loving, lingering touch 
of her lips — and dreaming over that fresh happiness whose 
solitary reveries were dearer to him now than the society 
or the sleep which he had used to court as Lethean draughts. 

His life had never seemed so sweet, the peace he had 
won so perfect ; and when his servant rapped gently at the 
door, though infinitely too sweet-tempered, and, truth to 
tell, too lazy to irritate himself about trifles, he was annoyed 
and sorry to be disturbed. 

“I told you not to interrupt me till I rang for my choco- 
late,” he said, in that low voice which someway or other 
gained him more obedience than the louder tone or more 
angry command of other men, from his servants, wdio stayed 
with him long, and liked no other service after his. 

‘'I beg your pardon. Colonel,” answered his man, sub- 
missively. “I should not have interrupted you, but there 
8 a person asking to see you upon business, and, as he 
said it was of great importance, I did not know, sir, what 
would be best to do.” 

“What is always best to do is to obey me to the letter — 
fou can never be wrong then. The person could have 
waited. What is his name ?” 

“He would not give it, sir; he wished to see you.” 

“I see no one before two o’clock in the day. Go, tell 
tiim so.” 

The man obeyed; but in a minute or two he returned. 

“ The gentleman will take no denial, Colonel. He begs 
you to see him.” 

“What an impertinent fellow 1” said Sabretasche to him- 
self, with a surprised hauteur on his delicate features. 
“ Tell him I will not see him — that is sufficient. I see no 
one who does not send in his card.” 

•* But, sir — but ” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


21 


“Well, what? Speak out,” said Sabretasche, irritated 
at the disturbance. It seemed to let iu the disagreeables 
of outer life, and jar on the sweet thoughts so dear to his 
poet’s soul and lover’s heart. 

“But, sir, he says his business concerns you, and — and 
Miss Molyneux, sir.” 

I'he man hesitated — even servants living with Sabre- 
tasche caught something of his delicacy and refinement, 
and he knew intuitively how the mention of her name 
would annoy his master. A flush of astonishment and 
anger rose over Sabretasche’s pale forehead. He was but 
too sensitive over Violet, perhaps, from what he considered 
as the deep disgrace of his first marriage, and he almost 
disliked to hear servants’ lips breathe his idol’s name. 
“ Show him in,” he said, briefly, signing the man away. 
He lay still, full length on the couch, smoking from his 
hookah, stroking the Cid with one hand, but the flush of 
anger had not left his face, and a vague dread had taken 
the place of his peaceful and luxurious happiness. His 
past had been too fateful for him to join in Violet’s cloud- 
less and fearless trust in the future. One of the bitterest 
curses of sorrow is the fear that it leaves behind it, mak- 
ing us, with the sweetest cup to our lips, dread the unseen 
hand that will dash it down, hanging the funereal pall of 
the past over the most glittering bridal clothes of the 
present, and poisoning the sunshine that lies before us with 
ihe memory of those clouds which, having so often come 
before, must, it seems to us, come yet again. When sorrow 
has once been upon us, we have no longer faith in life — we 
have but Hope, and Hope, God-given as she is, is but fear- 
ful, and fluttering, and evanescent at best. 

He lay still ; the fair morning sunlight falling clear upon 
him and upon the brilliant and witching face glowing on 
the easel at his side. Vulgar and cruel eyes looked iu on 


22 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the sctne — at the luxurious and beautiful studio, where 
every trifle was a gem of art; where the morning sunlight 
fell sweet and subdued through the rich folds of the cur- 
tains, and the air was redolent of a dreamy and delicious 
perfume — at the man of aristocracy and refinement, with 
all his grace and beauty, all his delicate and artistic sur- 
roundings; and a vulgar and cruel mind gloated with 
delight on the desolation and torture he had power to in- 
troduce into that peaceful and brilliant life. Sabretasche 
lifted his eyes with his characteristic indolence and hauteur 
— as he did so, the slight flush upon his face died utterly 
away; he grew pallid as death. He saw Guiseppe da’ 
Castrone — the man linked with his hours of greatest shame, 
of most bitter misery — the brother and the emissary of his 
faithless wife. Involuntarily he rose, fascinated by the 
sight of the man connected with the deepest wrong and 
deepest sorrow of his life, and the Italian looked at him 
with a smile that showed his glittering white teeth, as a 
hound, who has seized the noblest of Highland royals at 
bay, shows his in the cruel struggle. Sabretasche spoke 
first, in Italian, with all the loathing that he felt for this 
man who had stooped to live upon gold wrung from the 
husband that his own sister had wronged. 

“ Signor Castrone, this is a very unexpected intrusion. 
Your negotiations with me are at an end. Allow me to 
request you to withdraw.” 

“Wait one moment. Signor Sabretasche,” answered the 
Neapolitan, with a cunning leer in his bright sharp eyes. 
**Are our negotiations at an end?” 

“ So entirely, that if you do not leave my presence 1 
shall be compelled to bid my servants make you.” 

The Italian laughed. The cold, contemptuous tone of 
the high-born gentleman stung him, and gave him but the 
greater gusto for his task. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


23 


“Not so fast, buon’ amico, not so fast; we are brothers- 
in-law, remember I It would not do for us to quarrel.” 

The blood crimsoned Sabretasche’s face up to his verj 
temples; a passion of scorn quivered over his delicate lips. 

“The tie you dare to mention and appeal to, ought to be 
your bitterest disgrace. Since you are dead to shame, I 
need feel none for you; and if you do not leave the room, 
my servants will compel you.” 

“Per fede!” said the Italian, with a scoffing laugh. 
“You will scarcely call your household in to witness your 
connection with me. They can hear the secret if you 
choose; it matters nothing to me; only I fancied that 
now, of all times, you would rather have kept it under- 
hand. You are going to be married, caro, I hear, to a 
lovely English girl — is it not so ?” 

Sabretasche answered nothing, but stretched out his 
hand to the bell-handle in the wall nearest him. He felt 
it beneath him to bandy words with such a man as Gui- 
seppe da’ Castrone, who, a sort of gentlemanlike lazza- 
rone, half swindler, half idler, a Southern Bohemien, had 
lived on his wits till, as inevitably in that precarious mode 
of subsistence, he had lost all the traces of honor, or deli- 
cacy, or better feeling, with which he perhaps might have 
begun life. He touched Sabretasche’s wrist as the Colo- 
nel’s white, slender hand was approaching the bell. Sa- 
bretasche flung off the grasp, as if it had been pollution ; 
but before he could ring, the Neapolitan spoke, still with 
a smile, half cunning, half malicious : 

“Would it not have been wiser, Eccelenza, before you 
had taken one wife, to have made sure you had lost the 
other?” 

. With all his calm nerve and habitual impassiveness, Sa- 
bretasche started, and a deadly anguish of dread fastened 
upon him. But he spoke with the proud and contemptuous 


24 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


to’ie for which Castrone hated him so bitterly; for though 
ne had done dirty tricks enough to brazen him to any 
shame, the Italian was still too sensitive, amid his coarse- 
ness, not to shrink from the disgust which the fastidious 
Englishman had never scrupled to conceal in the short 
interviews they had had during twenty long years. 

“Yours is a very stale device,” said Sabretasche, calmly. 
“Too melodramatic to extort money from me. If you 
want a few scudi to buy you macaroni, or game away at 
dominoes, ask for them in plain words, and I may give you 
them out of charity.” 

lie stood leaning his arm upon the top of his easel; his 
tall and graceful figure erect; the pride of the patrician, 
and the scorn and loathing of the man of honor and refine- 
ment, written on his pale features, and in the depths of his 
soft, mournful eyes; speaking gently and slowly — but, how 
bitterly ! — in his low, silvery voice. The tone, the glance, 
the mien, woke all the darkest malice that slept in the 
Italian’s heart for his sister’s high-born and high-souled 
husband. His eyes glittered like an angry animal’s; he 
dropped the smoother tone which he had used before, for 
the one of coarse and malicious vindictiveness natural to 
him. 

“Santa Maria I don’t take that proud tone with me, 
carissimo, or I may make you glad to change it, and turn 
your threats into prayers. You are not quite so near 
happiness as you fancy, my fine gentleman. That is your 
young love’s picture, no doubt ? Ah ! it is a fair face ; it 
will go hard to lose it, I dare say ? It would go harder 
still if one of the proud, fastidious Sabretasches were tried 
for bigamy I It would not look pretty in the London 
papers, where his name has been so often as a leader of 
fashion and ” 

Before he could end his sentence Sabretasche had sprung 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB. 


25 


at him, rapidly and lightly as a panther, and seized him 
by the throat: 

“Wretch, you lie I How dare you to insult me I By 
Heaven ! if it were not too great honor for you, I would 
kill you where you stand I” 

So fierce was the grasp of his white slender fingers, in 
the passion into which his sweet temper and gentle nature 
was at length roused, that the Italian, almost throttled, 
struggled with difficulty from his hold. 

“You lie!” said Sabretasche, flinging him off with a 
force that sent him reeling from him. “ The woman whom 
you venture to recall as my wife is dead I” 

“Per Dio, is she? You will find to the contrary, bel 
signor. Basta ! but your hands have no baby’s grasp; you 
had better have joined them in prayer, best brother-in- 
law. If you marry the English beauty, you will have two 
wives on your shoulders, and one has been more than you 
have managed 1” 

Sabretasche’s eyes were fixed upon him, fascinated by 
horror as an antelope by a rattlesnake. “Two wives — 
two wives I” he muttered incoherently, like a man in de- 
lirium. “ She is dead, I tell you — she is dead I” Then 
the sense of what the Neapolitan had said came clearer to 
his mind, and, with an efilbrt, he regained his calm and 
haughty tone, speaking slowly between his teeth : “ Signor 
Castrone, once more I will request you, for your own sake, 
to leave this house quietly, without compelling me to the 
force I am loth to use, out of regard for the dead. With 
her, the grave buries all past errors; but with you, I still 
shall treat as with any other swindler and perjurer who 
tries to coin money through stories only fit to chicane 
boys. I am not a likely person to be terrified by secret 
innuendoes or open insults. This time I will let you go — 
you are beneath ray anger — but if you intrude yourself 

VCL. 11 . 3 


26 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


into this house, or venture to approach me again, I shall 
call in the law to rid me of a pest.” 

Something in his voice, which had ever a strange spell 
for man or woman, and which now, soft as it was in the 
utterance of his native Italian, bore that subtle magic of 
command which superiority of character and of mind 
always confer, had awed the coarser nature into silence 
while he spoke; but when he paused, Castrone broke out 
into a long, discordant, malicious laugh, jarring like jangled 
bells upon every nerve and chord in the listener’s heart. 

“Diavolol buon’ amico, it will be I, more likely, who 
have the law upon you! Sylvia is alive — alive! and your 
lawful wife. Colonel Sabretasche, from whom nothing but 
death can ever divorce you: and I do not think she loves 
you well enough, milor, to let another woman reign in her 
stead without making you pay the heaviest penalty she can 
for your double marriage ! Wait! you saw the death of a 
Silvia da’ Castrone in Galignam, I dare say? You had 
the certificate of such a death from Naples? Yery pos- 
sibly; but her aunt Silvia da’ Castrone died last May in 
Naples, and it was her obituary that you saw. If Sylvia 
died, (as Santa Maria forbid !) it would be recorded as 
what she is, and what she will be while life lasts — however 
you may try to alter it — the wife of Vivian Sabretasche. 
Sylvia lives — nay, she is in London, ready to proclaim her 
right to your name to the Signorina Molyneux — is not 
that your new love? — or, if your union with the English 
girl takes place before she can do so, she will then prose- 
cute you according to your English law. She was married 
in England, you remember; she has not lost the certificate, 
and the register is correct in Marylebono Church — I saw 
it but this morning. It is no idle tale, I tell you, buou’ 
amico. I know you too well to try and palm one off unou 
you unless I could substantiate it. Your wife is ali^e, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


27 


fratello mio ! I fear me there will be some few difiBculties 
in the way of your marrying your young beauty i” 

As the Italian spoke in his coarse brutal tones, with his 
low, malicious laugh like the hissing of a serpent, every 
word he uttered falling like seething fire on his listener’s 
heart, Sabretasche stood gazing upon him. In his parted 
lips, his eyes wide opened with the horror of amazement 
on every feature, already blanched and wan, was marked 
the deadly anguish of despair, mingled with the vague and 
almost dreamy terror of this shock, so sudden and so hor- 
rible ; then, as the full meaning of the words he heard cut 
gradually into his brain, his strength gave way, and he 
sank down upon his couch, covering his face with his 
hands, while great drops of agony stood upon his brow, 
and a bitter cry broke from the great passion that had 
grown and strengthened and entwined itself around his 
heart, till it were easier to drain that heart of its life-blood 
than its love. 

The Neapolitan stood by, gloating at the ruin he had 
wrought, watching with the fiendish malice of a coarse and 
brutal nature the suffering of a higher and a nobler. He 
had often longed to revenge the silent scorn, the cutting 
contempt, the high-bred hauteur with which the man upon 
whose gold he lived had treated him ; he had often thirsted 
for the time to come when Sabretasche should be humbled 
before him — when it should be his turn to hold the power 
which could at will remove or let fall the sword that hung 
above his victim’s head — when it should be his to torture 
that only too sensitive and too deeply feeling nature, and 
to see, writhing in anguish before him, the haughty gentle- 
man at whose glance and whose word he had so often 
fliuched and slunk away. He stood by and watched him — 
unspeakably dear to the vindictive Italian was the mute 
anguish before him. Sabretasche had forgotten all sense 


28 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


of his presence, all memory of the coarse, cruel eyes that 
saw the grief of one who so long had persuaded the world 
that he valued life too little to give it aught but smiles : 
Heart, mind, and sense had all flown to her, his young, 
pure, true, idolized love, who now might never be his wife. 
The hissing, mocking tones of the Italian broke in on the 
sanctity of his silent grief. Castrone laughed the laugh 
of a devil at the fell despair wrought by his own work. 

“Milor does not seem charmed to hear of his wife; it 
does not seem to bring him the connubial rapture one 
would expect?” 

The jeer, the taunt, the mockery of his woe stung into 
madness the heart of the man whose over-refinement and 
susceptibility taught him to shrink even from the delicate 
sympathy of friends, and whose keen sensitiveness had 
oftentimes won him the imputation of lack of feeling, be- 
cause he felt too deeply to bear to unveil his sorrows to 
the glare of daylight and the sneers of men. 

Sabretasche started, as at the sharp touch of the knife 
at a fresh wound, and shivered as if with cold, the cold of 
death in Arctic regions. He lifted his face, aged in those 
brief moments as by long years of woe; but the old pride 
and shrinking refinement were not dead in him yet. He 
caught the eyes of Guiseppe da’ Castrone; and though he 
had died, not another sign should have escaped him of the 
anguish which would have been food for ridicule and joy 
to the foe he loathed. But he could not hide his face from 
the Neapolitan’s cruel gaze, and there the brother of his 
wife read desolation enough to satiate a fiend. 

“If this alone were your errand,” he said, with effort — 
and how hollow and altered his voice sounded even in his 
own ears — “you have no further excuse for intrusion. I 
shall take means for verifying your story ; and now begone, 
while I can keep my hands from revenging your insults.” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


29 


**Here is your proof,” said Castrone, briefly. 

Sabretasche mechanically read what he held to him; 
that too was brief. 

“If you will it, you can see me once more to-day — but 
only to remind you that while I live no other can call her- 
self your wife. 

Sylvia Sabretasche.” 

Though he had not seen it for more than twenty long 
years, he knew the writing to be his wife’s — the woman 
from whom no laws would rid him. All hope died in him 
then ; he knew that she lived — the wife who had wedded 
him to misery and disgrace ; the wife who now came for- 
ward, after the absence and the silence of twenty years, to 
ban him from the better life to which a gentler and a 
purer hand was about to lead him. 

“/ see herl” he repeated, indignant passion flashing out 
amid the unutterable anguish of his face. “/ see the 
woman who made my youth miserable, my manhood pur- 
poseless; who disgraced my name, who betrayed my love; 
who for twenty years has lived upon my gold, yet never 
addressed to me one word of repentance, regret, remorse ; 
never one word to confess her crimes; never one prayer to 
ask forgiveness of her falsehood ! I see her! IIow dare 
she ask it? How dare she sign herself by the name she 
has polluted ? Go, tell her that she will bribe me no more, 
that she is free to do her worst that devils can prompt her, 
that she may proclaim her marriage with me far and wide ; 
I care not! She may write her lying story in all the 
papers if she will ; she may persuade all England* and all 
Italy that she is a fond, deserted wife, and I a cruel, 
faithless husband ; she may bring my name into courts if 
she choose, to sue me for her maintenance; but tell her, 
OQce for all, I give her no more bribes. I disown her, 

3 * 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


dO 

though the laws will not divorce her. Now go; go, I tell 
you, or by Heaven I will not let you leave in peace 

The fierce but coward nature of the Neapolitan quailed 
before the mighty anguish and concentrated passions 
flashing from the calm and melancholy eyes of the usually 
gentle and impassive Englishman. He spoke more softly, 
more timidly, smoothing down the coarseness of his natu- 
ral tone. 

“But, signor, listen. If you feel thus toward my poor 
sister, and will not believe that your hatred to her is with- 
out cause, would you not rather that the world knew no- 
thing of your marriage?” 

“Since it cannot be broken, all the world may know it. 
I will bribe you no longer. Begone I” 

“Nay, one word — but one word, signor. If I could 
show you how you might still wed your young Englisn 
love ” 

How iron a nerve Sabretasche needed to still the an- 
guish that seized him with the chill horror of a death 
spasm, as the Neapolitan’s rough hand touched the dearest 
thought, the strongest passion, the wildest despair of his 
life, his love ever so tenacious over its secret, now full of 
such anguished tenderness I The struggle lasted but a 
moment, but that moment was time enough for the Neapol- 
itan to note the torture he inflicted, while the fierce ges- 
ture of his listener warned him to hasten, if he would be 
heard; for coarse though Castrone’s own thoughts were, 
and deadened his susceptibilities, instinct told him how 
sharper than a dagger’s thrust, and more bitter than poison 
to the man of pride and reserve and refinement was this 
rending of the veil of the one sacred temple by a coarse 
and sacrilegious hand. 

“Listen,” he said in his sweet, swift language, with the 
glitter of cunning in his keen, bright eyes. “No one noi/v 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


31 


living knows of your union with my sister save your- 
self, and Sylvia, and I. It is utterly unknown in England; 
men do not dream that you are a married man. much less 
will they think of turning over the register of Marylebone 
Church for a date of more than twenty years ago. Your 
young love, her father, her friends, all your circle, need 
never know your wife is living unless you, or she, or I tell 
them. If any question ever arose about your first mar- 
riage, your word, and the certificate, if you had it, of a 
Silvia da’ Castrone’s death, (and our aunt Silvia was the 
same age as her niece,) would be amply sufficient. They 
would never insult a gentleman like Vivian Sabretasche by 
doubting his word, and prying into details of his past his- 
tory I Sylvia and I are poor, signdr raio, very poor; per 
Baccho, she has lu.xurious habits, and I — an Italian who is 
noble cannot soil his hands with work 1 We are South- 
erns, we love our dolce, our pleasure, our ease, and, Santa 
Maria 1 we have none of the three. Signor mio, we are 
as poor as the rats in the Vicaria; and if, as you say, you 
will not support your wife as you have done hitherto, she 
must apply to your law courts for maintenance. She will 
do so, and, basta ! it is no more than her rights ; had she 
followed my counsels, she would not have let them lie unas- 
serted so long. But she bids me make you this offer, and 
it is a noble and a generous one from a wronged woman ; 
still, she feels that you hate her, and would not force her- 
self upon you, nor, now that her own life is blighted, ruin 
yours in return. If you will pay us down twenty thousand — 
it is but a drop in the ocean out of all your wealth — only 
twenty thousand, signor; we are very moderate! — we will 
bind ourselves — your wife and I, sole living witnesses of 
vour marriage — by every oath most sacred in your eyes and ♦ 
in ours — (and we Catholics keep our oaths; we are not 
blasphemers like your churchmen, who kiss the book in 


3‘2 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


your law courts and perjure themselves five seconds after I)-^ 
we will swear by every oath in earth or heaven, never to 
reveal your marriage to any mortal soul. You may wed 
your young English love — see, her fair face woos you from 
the glowing canvas — she will never know that another lives 
who might dispute her title ; you may win her and marry 
her ; you may have all the rapture for which your heart 
thirsts. Men say you love her strangely well — and you 
are more than half Southern, signor; yours will be no 
calm and frigid happiness, such as content the cold, tame 
Plnglish. With that face — see how the fond, brilliant eyes 
follow you even from the dumb canvas, as though in prayer 
to you never to desert her — with that face beside you, that 
heart beating with yours, gods might envy you your para- 
dise I And if our lips are silenced — and silent they will 
be as the grave — none need ever know, need ever guess that 
any woman ever bore your name before her. You need 
have no scruple, for, since you say you disown her, what- 
ever the law decrees, you must feel as thoroughly divorced 
as though men’s words had unlocked your fetters, and, per 
Dio I if twenty long years’ separation is not divorce in 
Heaven’s sight, what is‘^ Accept Sylvia’s olfer — your 
marriage is virtually dissolved as though no tie of law 
existed — and long years of love and happiness await you 
with the woman you idolize. Refuse it, your marriage will 
be known all over England beyond hope of concealment 
or dissolution, and as long as her life lasts you will be the 
husband of my sister, and you will see your English girl 
the wedded wife of some other and some happier-fated 
man. Choose, signor — and the choice is very easy— you 
who have never hesitated to pay any price for pleasure, 
will hardly refuse so small a price for happiness I Choose, 
signor, the game is in your own hands.” 

With what subtle ingenuity, what devilish skill, was the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


33 


temptation put I The Neapolitan watclied the speeding 
of his poisoned arrows, and saw that they bad hit their 
quarry. Sabretasche leaned against the wall, pallid as 
the dead, his lips pressed in to keep down the agony 
within him to which he would not give vent; a shiver as 
though of icy cold agaiu passed over his frame, burning 
as it w'as with feverish passions; he breathed in quick, 
short gasps, as if panting for very life; his eyes were 
fixed on what his tempter had truly termed that fond 
and brilliant face, whose loving gaze turned on him from 
the canvas, tempted him, how fiercely I how pitilessly I as 
woman’s beauty has ever tempted man’s honor to its fall, 
as the Philistine tempted the Nazarene from his vow, the 
Lydian Queen Alcmena’s son from his strength, the 
Egyptian siren “lost Anthony” from glory, victory, and 
life I The Italian saw the struggle, and glutted in his 
vengeance. Heaven knows we need be strong indeed to 
suffer in such a struggle and come out victorious in the 
fight I Sabretasche had been more than mortal if he had 
not wavered and trembled under it; he to whom pleasure 
had been law, and to wish was to have ! How fierce was 
the temptation no man could ever know! Was he a god 
to put aside the glittering cup of life, and take np with 
nnshaking hand the deadly poison that would wither all 
the future ? 

On the one side was a brilliant and golden life for him 
and for the woman dearest to him on earth ; on the other 
hand was desolation, dark, dreary, hopeless, for them both. 
Not he alone would suffer; it was her doom that his own 
will would seal, her head on which the blow would fall, 
unless he choose to arrest it; she out of whose young life 
he would crush all the glory; she whom he sras called upon 
to murder with a more cruel stroke than the blow that 
aonor forced from the Roman on his sons. If it had 


34 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


chanced that he had lived in those stoic ages, and duty 
had bidden him slay the woman he loved, we in these later 
times should have mourned over his cruel fate, and mar- 
veled at the nerve that, armed by honor, could quench the 
light from those fond, tender eyes that only beamed for 
him; yet if now he shrink from striking the heart that 
trusts him, and hangs all its hopes upon him, with a far 
keener thrust, and banishing forever from her life its glori- 
ous and gracious youth, none will pity him, none excuse him 
that his hand may tremble and his breaking heart may fail I 
How fierce was the temptation I There on the lifeless 
easel beamed the fair, fond face, pleading for her joy and 
his own. Before him stretched two lives: one radiant and 
blessed, full of the love and rest for which his heart was 
weary, the beloved companionship, the sympathy of thought 
and feeling, all that makes existence of beauty and of value; 
the other dark and desolate, with no hope, no release from 
the chains that would fetter him as the bonds that bound 
the living man to the dead corpse, no relief from the haunt- 
ing passions, the inextinguishable love which would burn 
within, till stilled in the cold slumber of the grave. All 
wooed him to the one; all nature, all manhood, all 
inborn affections rebelled against the other. He had 
disowned his wife; he knew that in the sight of God 
Violet alone could ever have right to bear the title. In 
his own heart he considered his marriage annulled since 
the day he left his wife in Naples, as virtually and as en- 
tirely as though dissolved by a jury’s verdict; in his own 
heart he would have held himself fully justified if he had 
then wedded Violet by vows the most sacred human lips 
could frame. * 

All urged him to listen to his tempter — all — save honor, 
and that shrank from the stain of deceit and falsehood. He 
had paid down all prices save this for pleasure; he would 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


35 


not pay this now, even though the barter were hell for 
heaven. He would himself have wagered life, ,or honor, 
or soul to win her, but for her sake he would not wrong 
her. His eyes were still fastened upon her picture, and 
there her eyes answered his — clear, fond, true, even while 
tempting him his better angel still. He could not win her 
'by wrong, woo her with deception, stand beside the altar 
with her hand in his, and her gaze upon him, and vow 
there was no impediment between their marriage, while he 
knew that his first wife lived, who, however he might dis- 
own her, would have legal right to tear the wedding-ring 
from Violet’s finger and deny her title to his name and 
home. He loved her. Heaven knows, better than life 
itself ; he loved her too well to win her by a wrong, and 
all the knightly and high-souled thoughts that slept be- 
neath the worldly exterior of the man of fashion and of 
pleasure revolted from the lie, the deception, and the 
shame of betraying a heart that trusted him by conceal- 
ment and by falsehood. How could he give his darling 
his name, knowing it was not hers ; call her his wife, 
knowing the title was denied her; live with her day by 
day, knowing at every moment he had wronged her and 
deceived her; receive her fond words, her innocent caresses, 
with the burden of that deadly shadow between them, which, 
if she saw it not, would never leave his sight, nor rid him 
of its haunting presence? Deadly was the temptation — 
deadly the struggle under it. His eyes were still fastened 
on the picture, whose brilliant beauty and grace stirred all 
his passions, but whose clear, true eyes still saved him from 
himself. Great drops stood upon his brow, his lips turned 
white as in the agonies of death, his hands clinched as in 
the combat with some actual foe, and the anguish of hia 
neart broke out in a low moan : 
have no strength for this I” 


36 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Why eudure it, then?” whispered the low, subtle voice 
of the Italian. “Freedom is in your own hands.” 

But the tempter had lost his power — the man whom the 
world said denied himself no pleasure and no wish, and 
whom society had whispered as a heartless and selfish 
libertine, put aside the joys that could only be bought 
with dishonor. Ilis eyes flashed with concentrated pas- 
sion, and over the death-like pallor of his face rose a deep 
crimson hue ; he caught the slight form of the Neapolitan 
in his grasp : 

“ Hound 1 dare you tempt me to wrong her — take your 
price I” 

He lifted him from the ground with the iron clasp of 
his left hand, opened the door of his studio, and threw 
him down the four steps that parted the chamber from the 
rest of the corridor leading to it. The Italian lay there, 
stunned for the moment with the fall ; Sabretasche closed 
the door upon him, and went in again alone — alone, in 
what a solitude I 

Long hours afterward he reissued from his chamber and 
entered his carriage, drawing down both blinds. A strange 
silence fell upon his house ; many of his servants loved him, 
through a service of kindness on the one hand, and fidelity 
on the other, and they knew instinctively that some great 
sorrow had fallen on their master. Very few minutes took 
him to Lowndes Square. The footmen, accustomed to his 
entrance half a dozen times a day, were about to show him, 
unasked, to the room where Violet was ; but Sabretasche 
signed them back, and went up the stairs to her boudoir 
alone. At the door he paused — what wonder? Could 
his heart help but fail him when he was about to quench 
all radiance from the eyes that took their brightness only 
from him? to carry the chill of death into a young life 
which had hitherto not known even a passing shade ? to 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


SI 

BRy to the woman pledged to be his wife, “I am the hus- 
band of another I” It is no exaggeration that he would 
have gone with thanksgiving to his own grave ; life could 
have no greater bitterness for him than this. 

Many moments passed; the time told off by the thick, 
slow throbs of his heart ; then he opened the door and 
entered. 

Yiolet sat in her favorite rose-velvet chair, her birds 
singing above her head, rich-hued flowers around her; the 
sunshine full upon her delicate dress, her bright chestnut 
hair, her lovely face the incarnation of beauty, youth, and 
joy. She looked up as the door opened, dropped her book, 
and sprang forward to her lover, her hands outstretched, 
her smile full of delight and gladness; not even a trace of 
long passed shadows on the fair young brow that had never 
known care, or sorrow, or remorse. In her joy, not noticing 
the change upon his face, she welcomed him with fond 
words and fonder caresses, each touch of her soft lips fall- 
ing on his cheek, to him like scorching fire. 

“Oh, Vivian I” she cried, “you said you would be here 
four hours ago, and how I have been watching for you I If 
you knew how long ten minutes seem without you, you 
would never be away from me if you could help it. You 
know I don’t believe in military duties I I should be your 
only thought.” 

She looked up in his face as she spoke the last words, 
but as she did so, her gay smile faded, and the sweet 
laughter from her eyes quenched in the shadow that 
already fell upon her from the curse he bore. 

“Vivian, my darling! you are not well. Oh, Heaven I 
what is it ?” 

He pressed her madly in his arms. “Hush, hush, or you 
will kill me.” 

The color fled from her face ; her eyes were full of piti- 
4 2 / 


VOL. H. 


88 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ful fear and half-conscious anguish, like a startled dect 
catching the first distant ring of the hunters’ feet. She 
hid her face upon his breast, and clung to him in dread 
of the unknown horror, while her voice rose in a plaintive 
cry, “Yivian, dearest I what has happened — no evil — to 
you ?” 

He held her in his arms as if no earthly power should 
rend her from him; and his lips quivered with anguish. 
“I cannot tell you — the worst that could happen to us 
both. Would to Heaven I had died ere I linked your 
fate to mine I” 

Clinging to him more closely, she looked up into his 
burning and tearless eyes, full of such unutterable tender- 
ness, such unspeakable despair ; there she read or guessed 
the truth, and, with a bitter wail, her arms unloosed their 
clasp, and she sank down from his embrace, lying on the 
ground in all her delicate beauty, stricken by her great 
grief, crushed and unconscious, like broken flowers in a 
tempest. 


PART THE SEVENTEENTH. 

I. 


HOW VIOLET MOLYNEUX TRANSLATED FIDELITY. 

Can you not fancy how eagerly all town, ever on the 
qui vive after scandal and gossip, darted like the vultures 
on a dying lion on the story of Vivian Sabretasche’s mar- 
riage? They were so outraged at its having been so long 
concealed so carefully, that those who collected scandales 
of their neighbors as industriously and persistently as 
Paris cheffoniers their rags, grubbing for them often in 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


39 


quite as filthy places, revenged themselves for the wrong 
he had done them, by telling it, garbled and distorted 
in every way that could be suggested by malice and the 
inborn love in human nature for retailing evil of its kind. 
Heaven knows through whom it first chiefly spread, whether 
from the lips of my Lady Molyneux, who hated him and 
loved the telling, or through his wife and her brotl er, who 
probably supplied the Court Talebearer, the St. James's 
Tittletatler, and such like journals with the vague, yet 
fully damnatory, versions that appeared in them of the 
Early history of a Colonel in the Queen’s cavalry, well 
known in fashionable circles as a dilettante, a lion, and a 
leader of ton, who has recently sought the hand of the 
beautiful daughter of an Irish Peer, and would have led 
her to the altar in a few days’ time, but for the unhappy, 
yet, considering the circumstances, fortunate discovery of 
the existence of a first wife, concealed by Colonel S. for 
the space of twenty years, during which period, it is said, 
the unfortunate wife has lived upon extraneous charity, 
denied even the ordinary necessities of existence by her 
unnatural husband, who, having wooed her in a passing 
caprice, abandoned her when one would have supposed his 
extreme youth might have preserved him from the bar- 
barity, and we, the moral censors of the age, must say, 
however reluctantly, villainy of such a course.” 

How it spread 1 cannot say. 1 only know it flew like 
wildfire. There were so many who hated him — as a man 
or a woman, superior in mind, or talent, or beauty, is cer- 
tain to be hated by those who cringe the lowest and court 
with the grossest flattery. Men who envied him his care- 
less successes in a thousand fields, who bore him malice 
for some mot, dropped in the abundance of his wit, that had 
hit some hypocrisy or petitesses, or owed him a grudge for 
that ratfine exclusiveness which made him shrink from any- 


40 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


thing under-bred or affected ; women who had loved that 
beautiful face and form, and had won no admiring glance 
in return, or who had only awoke from him that passagere 
eye passion which dies so soon, and now begrudged him to 
another younger and fairer. He had been passionately 
loved — he was hated in proportion; and all his “dearest 
friends” glutted over the story so long hidden from their 
inquiring eyes. Old dowagers mumbled it over their 
whist-tables, married beauties whispered it behind their 
fans, men gossiped of it in club-rooms; and in all was the 
version different. Men in general — save those jealous of 
him for having won Violet — took his part; but women — 
the soft-voiced murderers of so much fair fame — sided, 
without exception, against him ; called him villain ! be- 
trayer! all the names in their sentimental vocabulary; 
pitied his “poor dear wife;” doubted not she was a sweet 
creature sacrificed and thrown away ; lamented poor darling 
Violet’s fate, sighed over her infatuation for one against 
whom they had all warned her, and agreed that such a 
wretch should be excluded from society 1 Ah me ! if it 
were the fashion to stone the angel Gabriel — were such an 
individual extant — I fear me the spotlessness of his wings 
would not spare him one blackening blow, but rather, the 
purer they were, the more would men delight in swearing 
them black as Erebus. 

“I knew it!” said Lady Molyneux, with calm satiric 
bitterness, and that air of superiority which people assume 
when they give you what Madame de Stael wisely terms 
that “singuliere” consolation, “Je I’avais bieu dit !” “1 

knew it — I always told you what would come of that 
engagement — I was always certain what that man really 
was. To think of my poor sweet child running such a 
risk, it is too terrible ! If the marriage had taken place 
before this eclaircissemeut, I positively could not have 
visited my own daughter. Too terrible — too terrible!” 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


41 


“If it had done, Helena,” answered her husband, “1 
think you might have ‘countenanced’ poor Yy without 
disgrace. She would have been, at least, faithful to one, 
which certain stories would say, my lady, you are not 
always so careful to be I” 

The Viscountess deigned no reply to the coarse insinua- 
tion, but covered her face in her iiandkerchief, only re^ 
peating : 

“ I knew it 1 I knew it all along I If I had had my way, 
Violet would now be the honored wife of one of the first 
Peers of the ” 

“ If you did know it, madame,” interrupted Jockey Jack, 
sharply — “ if you did know poor Sabretasche’s wife was 
alive, it’s a pity you did not tell us so. I won’t have him 
blamed ; I tell you he’s a splendid fellow — a splendid fel- 
low — and the victim of a rascally woman. He can’t marry 
poor little Vy, of course — more fools those who make 
the laws! — but I won’t turn my back on him. He’s not 
the only husband who has very good motives for divorce, 
though the facts may not be quite clear to satisfy the 
courts.” 

With which fling at his wife, honest Jockey Jack, moved 
with more or less sympathy, from personal motives, for his 
daughter’s lover, took his hat and gloves, and banged out 
of the house, meeting on the door-step the Hon. Lascelles 
Faineant, who had received that morning in his Albany 
chambers a delicate missive from his virtuous Viscountess, 
commencing “Ami choisi de mon coeur.” Honest Jack 
Molyneux sided with Sabretasche, and told the true story 
wherever he went; ])ut he did not take up the cause as 
hotly as De Vigne, who, moved likewise, of course, by 
intense sympathy for his friend’s fate, so similar to his 
own, was filled with a passionate grief and pity for hii 

4 * 


42 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


wrongs, generous and vehement as his nature. When he 
was present he would never hear Sabretasche’s history dis- 
cussed — it was too private, he said, and too sacred to be 
touched: and I remember the first day the report was 
buzzed about town, and a young fellow, who had been 
blackballed at White’s by the Colonel, was beginning to 
sneer and to jeer at the story, whose misery and whose ma- 
jesty were alike so unintelligible to him, De Yigiie gave 
him the lie direct, his noble face flushing with righteous 
wrath ; hurled back in his teeth the insult to his absent 
friend, and would have further fought him out in Worm- 
wood Scrubbs if the man had not made *him a full recanta- 
tion and apology. 

So the journals teemed and the coteries gossiped of 
that great love whose depths they could neither guess at 
nor understand. Sabretasche’s fastidious delicacy could 
no longer shield him from coarse remark and prying eyes. 
The marriage which he considered disgrace, the love which 
he held as the dearest and most sacred part of his life, 
were the themes of London gossip, to be treated with a 
jeer, or, at best, with what was^far more distasteful to him, 
pity. However, scandal and the buzz of his circle, and 
the ill nature of his closest friends, were alike innocuous to 
him now; he neither knew nor heeded them, blind and 
deaf to all things, save his own utter anguish and the suffer- 
ing of the woman who loved him. It was piteous, they 
tell me, to see the change in our radiant and beautiful 
Yiolet under the first grief of her life — and such grief! 
She awoke from her trance that day do an anguish that 
was almost delirium ; and such a shock from a bright and 
laughing future to the utter desolation of a beggared 
present, has before now unseated intellects not perhaps 
the weaker for their extreme susceptibility. From wild 
disconnected utterances of passionate sorrow she would 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


43 


aink into a silent, voiceless suflferinj:^, worse to witness than 
any tears or laments. She would lie in Sabretasche's arms, 
with her bright-haired head stricken to the dust for love of 
him, uttering low plaintive moans that entered his very 
soul with stabs far keener than the keenest steel; then 
she would, cling to him, lifting her blanched face to his, 
praying to him never to leave her, or shrink still closer to 
him, praying to Heaven for mercy, and wishing she had 
died before she had brought sorrow on his head. It must 
have been a piteous sight — one to ring up from earth to 
Heaven to claim vengeance against the curse of laws that 
join hands set dead in wrath against each other, and part 
hearts formed for each other’s joy and linked by holiest 
love. 

It did not induce brain fever, or harm her so, belles lec- 
trices. If we went down under every stroke in that way, 
as novelists assume, we should all be loved of Heaven if 
that love be shown by early graves, as the old Greeks say. 

Violet'S youth was great, her stamina good, and though, 
if fever nad wrapped her unconscious in its embrace, it 
would have been happier for her, the young life flowed in 
her veins still purely and strongly under the dead weight 
that the mind bore. But for a day or so her reason seemed 
in danger; both were alike perilous to it — her passionate 
delirious agony or her mute tearless sorrow; and when 
her mother approached her, pouring in her commonplace 
sympathies, Violet gazed at her with an unconscious, be- 
wildered look in those eyes, once so radiant with vivid 
intelligence, which made even Lady Molyneux shudder 
with a vague terror, and a consciousness of the presence 
of a grief far beyond her powers to cure or calm. Sabre- 
tasche alone had influence over her. With miraculous self- 
command and self-sacrifice, while his owui heart was break- 
ing, he calmed himself to calm her; he alone had any 


44 


GRANVILLE DE V'IGNE. 


power to soothe her, and he would surrender the right to 
none. 

“You had better not see her again,” her father said to 
him one day — “much better not, for both of you. No 
good can come of it, much harm may. You will not 
misunderstand me when I say I must put an end to your 
visits here. It gives me intense regret. I have not known 
you these past months without learning to admire and to 
esteem you ; still, Sabretasche, you can well understand, 
that for poor A^y’s sake ” 

“Not see her again?” repeated Sabretasche, with some- 
thing of his old sneering smile upon his worn, wea.ried, 
haggard features. “Are you human, Molyneux, that you 
say that coldly and calmly to a man v/hom you know, to 
win your daughter, would brave death and shame, heaven 
and hell, yet who loved her better than himself, and would 
not do her wrong,, even to purchase the sole paradise he 
craves, the sole chance of joy earth will ever again offer 
him.?” 

“I know, I know,” answered Jockey Jack, hastily. 
“You are a splendid fellow, Sabretasche. I honor you 
from my soul. I have told my wife so, I would tell any 
one so. At the same time, it is just because, God help 
you I you have such a passion for poor little Yy, that I tell 
you — and I mean it, too, and I think you must see it your- 
self — that you had far better not meet each other any more, 
and, indeed, I cannot, as her father, allow it ” 

“No?” said Sabretasche, with a sternness and fierceness 
which Lord Molyneux had never imagined in his nature. 
“No? You side, then, my Lord Molyneux, with those 
who think, because misfortune has overtaken a man, he 
must have no mercy shown him. Listen to me ! You 
are taking dangerous measures. I tell you that, so well 
does Violet love me, that I have but to say to her, - Take 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


45 


pity on me, and give yourself to me,’ and I could make 
her leave you and her mother, her country and her friends, 
and follow me wherever I chose to lead her. If I exert 
my power over her, I believe that no authority of yours 
can or will keep her from me. It is not your word, nor 
society’s dictum, that holds me back; it is solely and en* 
tirely because, young, pure hearted, devoted as she is, I 
will not wrong her fond trust in me, by turning it to my 
own desires. I will not let my own passions blind me to 
what is right to her. I will not woo her in her extreme 
youth to a path which in maturer years she may live to 
regret and long to retrace. I will not do it. If I have 
not spared any other woman in my life, I will spare her. 
But, at the same time, I will not be parted from her utterly; 
I will not be compelled to forsake her in the hour of suffer- 
ing I have brought upon her. As long as she loves me I 
will not entirely surrender her to you or to any other man. 
You judge rightly; I dare not be with her long. God 
help me ! I should have no strength. A field is open now 
to every soldier; if my troop had not been ordered out, I 
should have exchanged, and gone on active service. My 
death would be the happiest thing for her; dead, I might 
be forgotten and — replaced; but for our farewell, eternal 
as it may be, I will choose my own hour. No man shall 
dictate or interfere between myself and Violet, who now 
ought to be — so near to one another I” 

Sternly and passionately as he had spoken, his lips 
quivered, his voice sank to a hoarse whisper, and he turned 
his head away from the gaze of his fellow-man. The honest 
heart of blunt, simple, obtuse Jockey Jack stirred for once 
into sympathy with the susceptible, sensitive, passionate 
nature beside him. He was silent for a moment, revolving 
in his mind the strange problem of this deep and tender 
love his daughter had awakened, musing over a charactei 


4f> GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 

BO nnlike his own, so far above any with which he had 
come in contact. Then he stretched out his hand with a 
sudden impulse: 

‘‘Have your own way, you are right enough. I put 
more faith in your honor than in bars and bolts. If you 
love Violet thus, I can’t say you shall not see her; her 
heart’s nigh broken as it is. God help you both! I’ll 
trust you with her as I would her brother!” 

I think Sabretasche had pledged himself to more than 
he could have fulfilled. It would have been beyond the 
strength of man to have seen Violet’s exquisite beauty 
crushed to earth for his sake, her brilliant and laughing 
eyes heavy with tears wrung from her heart’s depths, her 
delicate rose-liued lips, pale and compressed over her 
white teeth, as if in suffering that for the love of him 
she denied utterance, her head, with its wealth of chest- 
nut hair, bowed and bent with the weight of an anguish 
too great for her young life to bear; — to have heard her 
passionate bursts of sorrow, or, more pitiful still, the low 
moan with which she would lie for hours on the cushions 
of her boudoir, like a summer rose snapped off in the fury 
of a tempest, bewailing the loss of its fragrance and its 
beauty, and the fair, happy, sunny days that would never 
come again; — to be tortured with the touch of her soft 
hands clinging involuntarily to him, with her wild en- 
treaties to him not to leave her, to let her see him every 
day, if he went away from her she should die ! with her 
passionate words in calmer moments, promising eternal 
fidelity to him, and vowing to keep true to him, true as 
though she were his \vife — as she had hoped to be; — it 
was more than the strength of man to endure all this, and 
keep his word so constantly in sight as never to whisper 
to her of possible joy, never to woo her to a forbidden 
future. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


47 


He did keep it, with iron nerve and giant seif-subjection 
wonderful indeed in him, born in the voluptuous South, 
inheriting all its poetry and all its passion, and accustomed 
to an existence if of most refined still of most complete 
self-indulgence. He did keep it, though his heart would 
have broken — if hearts did break — ;in the agony crowded 
into those few brief days. Had his torture lasted longer, 
I doubt if he would have borne up against it; for, strong 
as his honor was, his l.ove was stronger still, and he was, 
as his nature made him, a man of like passions with our- 
selves. But the English and French troops were gather- 
ing in the East; months before the Guards had tramped 
through London streets in the gray of the morning, with 
their band playing their old cheery tunes, and their Queen 
wishing them God speed. For several months in Wool- 
wich Dockyards transports had been filling and ships weigh- 
ing anchor, and decks crowding with line on line of troops; 
already through England, after a forty years’ peace, the 
military s})irit of the nation had awoke ; the trumpet-call 
rang through the country, sounding far away through the 
length and breadth of the land, arousing the slumbering 
embers of war that had slept since Waterloo; already 
bitter partings were taking place in stately English homes, 
and by lowly farmstead hearths; and young gallant blood 
warmed for the strife, longing for the struggle to come, 
and knowing nothing of the deadly work of privation and 
disease, waiting, and chafing, and dying off under inaction, 
that was to be their doom. Ours were ordered to the 
Crimea with but a fortnight’s time for preparation ; where 
sharp work was to be done the Dashers were pretty sure 
to be in request. We were glad enough to catch a glimpse 
of active service and real life, after long years of dawdling 
in London drawing-rooms, and boring ourselves with the 
ennui of pleasures of which we had long tired. We had 


48 


GRANVILLE LE VIGNE. 


plenty to do in the few days’ notice — fresh harness, fresh 
horses, new rifles, and old liaisons; cases of Bass and 
cognac ; partings with fair women ; buying in camp furni- 
ture; burning the souvenirs of half a dozen seasons; the 
young ones thinking of Moore and Byron, the Bosphorus 
and veiled Haidees, we of Turkish tobacco, Syrian stal- 
lions, Minies, and Long En fields. We had all plenty to 
do, and the Crimea came to us as a good bit of fun, to 
take the place that year of the Western Highlands, the 
English open, or yachting up to Norway or through the 
Levant. 

Heaven knows how Sabretasche broke the news to 
Violet, or how that young heart bore the last drop which 
filled her cup to overflowing. Lord Molyneux was true 
to his word ; no strange eyes looked upon the sanctity of 
their grief; they had the only consolation left to them, 
they suffered together! Violet’s first delirious madness 
had sunk now into a dull, mute, hopeless anguish, even 
still more pitiable to witness ; her life, so full of brilliance 
and of beauty, seemed utterly stricken and broken down. 
She had been so used to sunshine ! who could marvel that 
BO delicate a flower, so used to cloudless skies and tropic 
warmth, was crushed under the first burst of the thunder- 
storm above her head. She tried her utmost to bear up 
against it, for his sake ; she did her best to bear the curse 
of their mutual fate as well as she could, and she would 
give him a smile more sad than any tears, faint and wan 
as the pale autumn sunshine quivering on a corpse. If he 
had not been ordered to sail for the Crimea, I doubt if he 
could have kept his word to her father! From the hour 
she heard of his departure on foreign service, the nobler 
and stronger part of her character awoke, and she was 
worthier still of a man’s whole life and love than in her 
bright and laughing beauty, in her deep and silent sorrow, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


49 


when for his sake she repressed the bitter utterances of de- 
spair, and, while her heart was bursting, tried, with a selh 
control wholly foreign to her impulsive and impetuous 
nature, to soothe him and to calm him under their mutual 
curse. Only now and then her courage broke dowm ; then 
she would cling to him with a terrible brilliance in her hot 
dry eyes, moaning like a child delirious in pain, telling 
him he must not go, he would never come back to her 
again I 

“I will not let you go,” she cried; “you have made me 
love you, you have no right to leave me so. We may never 
meet again, you know, and when I am dead you cannot see 
me, and if you go away from me I shall die ! I cannot live 
without ever seeing you. Think how long life is I I can- 
not bear it alone, always alone, always parted, you and I 
who were to be so happy. You shall not go 1” she cried, 
her voice changing from a strangelydull and dreamy hope- 
lessness into the wildness of despair. “You shall not go, 
they will keep you away from me, they will never let you 
Bee your poor Violet again, they will kill you in that cruel 
war I I will not let you go ; you have a right to listen to 
me. I love you more dearly than any other woman ever 
did on earth !” 

“Oh, Heaven I — hush!” cried Sabretasche, while the 
hands that clasped on hers trembled like a woman’s. 
“Dear as your words are to me, do not speak them, if 
you would not drive me to madness. While you love me 
I will never utterly give you up. No power on earth shall 
condemn us all our Hves to that absence which makes life 
worse than death, cursed wdth the desolation, but not 
blessed with the unconsciousness of the grave. But I 
dare not look at our future ; as yet there is nothing for 
us but to suffer ! My honor every way — as a soldier, as a 
man— bind me to leave you now. 1 stand pledged to take 

5 


VOL. II. 


60 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


mj part in this Crimean campaign. For you I should 
break my word, for the first time in all my life — for 
Heaven’s sake, my own love, do not tempt me ” 

His voice sank into a hoarse, inarticulate murmur; and 
even while he bade her not to tempt him, he looked down 
into her eyes, whose brilliance was quenched in such bitter 
anguish, and pressed his lips on hers whose beauty lured 
him with such resistless strength. The sight of her up- 
raised face, the mocking vision of all that he had lost, the 
struggle in his own heart of love and honor, utterly un- 
manned him ; his chest rose and fell with uncontrollable 
sobs; and large tears forced themselves from his burning 
eyes as he bowed his head upon his hands, convulsed with 
the emotion he had no power to subdue. Trembling and 
terrified at the grief, whose vehemence she could not soothe, 
since every fond word she uttered was but fuel to the flame, 
Yiolet knelt down beside him — roused out of her own 
almost delirious sorrow, to the innate unselfishness and 
heroism which lay in her heart, though her gay and care- 
less life, joyous and thoughtless as a girl’s could be, had 
never called them into play. 

“Vivian, my darling,” she whispered, leaning her head 
against him, and clasping her fingers round his wrist to try 
and draw away one hand from his face, “you shall never 
hear another word from me to dissuade you from what you 
hold your duty as a soldier. You have never stained your 
honor yet ; you shall not tarnish it for me ! Go, since you 
must. I will try to bear it; though we are parted, my 
heart will not break while you still love me. Ours is no 
summer-day love to shake with every breath. Hid we not 
promise to love one another, not for a day, not for a year, 
but for as long as our lives should last? and while we love, 
Vivian, we cannot be wholly parted. Heaven knows, that 
what we suffer is bitter as death ; but sufieriiig for you is 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


51 


dearer to me than every joy that earth could give me with 
another. If I may not be your wife, I will be truer to you 
while my life lasts than ever any wife was to her husband. 
You need no vows, dearest, to tell you I shall be faithful 

He did not answer, save with a sigh from his heart’s 
depths, and, overwhelmed with the sight of the passionate 
grief she had no power to still, and to which she had no 
hope to offer, Violet bowed her head upon his arm, mingling 
in silent anguish her tears with his : 

“ God help us I what have we done to be forced to live 
apart — doomed to suffer like this ?” 

Sabretasche started violently at her piteous words, and 
sprang to his feet, his face pale as death, and his heart throb- 
bing to suffocation. He clasped her in his arms and kissed 
her, more passionately than, as her affianced husband, he had 
ever done even in their sweet meetings and partings during 
their engagement, even on that night when she first pledged 
hei'self to be his wife. 

“ Heaven guard you ! — I dare stay no longer ! — Be true 
to me if you would save me from madness,” he murmured. — . 
And he had left her before she could say one word to de- 
tain him. 

I think his word to Lord Molyneux was very nearly 
being broken that day. If it had been, I think the blame 
would scarcely have rested upon Sabretasche more than 
•upon the slave who, with the curse of iron fetters upon 
him, rebels against unnatural laws, and tries to struggle 
from the bondage which robs him of the sole thing that 
makes life of value — Liberty. 


52 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


II. 


BOW A WOMAN MADE FEUD BETWEEN PALAMON AND AR* 

CITE, AND PASSION AWOKE TENFOLD STRONGER FOR ITS 

REST. 

“Colonel Brandling wishes to speak to you^ Major,” 
said his man to De Yigne, one morning when Granville 
was dressing, after exercising his troop up at Wormwood 
Scrubbs. 

“ Colonel Brandling ? Ask him if he’d mind coming up 
to me here, if he’s in a hurry,” answered De Yigne going 
on brushing his whiskers. He did not bear Curly the 
greatest good-will since seeing him under the chestnut- 
trees at St. Crucis — where, by the way, he himself had not 
been since. 

“May I come in, old fellow?” asked Curly’s voice at the 
door. 

“ Certainly. Entrez 1” 

Curly came in accordingly, but not with his quick step 
and his gay voice ; the one usually no heavier, the other 
not one whit less joyous, than in his boyish days at Fres- 
tonhills. 

“You are an early visitor, Curly,” said De Yigne, rather 
curtly. “I thought you’d prefer coming up here instead 
of waiting ten minutes while I washed my hands and put 
myself en bourgeois.” 

“Yes, I have come early,” began Curly, so abstractedly 
that De Yigne swung round, looked at him, and noticed 
with astonishment that his light-hearted Frestonhills i)et 
seemed strangely down in the mouth. Curly was distrait 
and absent; he looked worried, and there were dark circles 
beneath his eyes as of a man who has passed the night 
tossing on his bed to painful thoughts. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


53 


“What’s the matter, Curly ?” asked De Vigne. “Has 
Heliotrope gone lame, Lord Ormolu turned crusty, Eiidoxie 
Lemaire deserted you, or what is it?” 

Curly smiled, but very sadly. 

“Nothing new; I have made a fool of myself, that’s 
all” 

“And are come to me for auricular confession ? What 
is the matter. Curly ?” asked De Vigne, his anger vanishing 
at once, and his interest awakening; for he had had a real 
and cordial affection for Curly ever since he had cham* 
pioned and petted the boy at Frestonhills. 

“Imprimis, I have asked a woman to be my wife,” 
answered Curly, with a nervous laugh, playing with the 
bouquet bottles on the table. 

De Vigne started perceptibly ; he looked up with a rapid 
glance of interrogation, but he did not speak, except a 
rather haughty and impatient “Indeed!” 

Curly did not notice his manner, he was too ill at ease, 
too thoroughly absorbed in his own thoughts, too entirely 
at a loss, for the first time in his life, how to express what 
he wanted to say. Curly had often come to De Vigne 
wi^h the embarrassments and difficulties of his life ; when 
he had dropped more over the Oaks than he knew exactly 
how to pay, or entangled himself where a tigress grip held 
him tighter than he relished ; but there are other things 
that a man cannot so readily say to another, and I have 
often noticed that the deeper any feelings are, or the more 
they do him honor, the more reluctant is he to drag them 
into daylight and hold them up for show. 

“ Well ?” said De Vigne, impatient at his silence, and 
more anxious, perhaps, than he would have allowed to 
hear the end of these confessions. “Certainly the step 
shows no great wisdom; but marriages are general 
enough, and you have wiser men than either you or I, 

5 * 2 </ 


54 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


sharers in the hallucination. Who has bewitched you 
into it?” 

“You can guess, I should say.” 

“Not I; I am no CEdipus; and of all riddles, men’s 
folly with women is the hardest to be read.” 

“Yet you might. Who can be with her and resist 
her ” 

“Her? — who? Speak intelligibly, Curly,” said De 
Vigne, irritably. “Remember your lover’s raptures are 
Arabic to me.” 

“In a w^ord, then,” said Curly, hurriedly, “I love Alma 
Tressillian, and I have told her so.” 

De Yigne’s eyebrows contracted, his lips turned pale, 
and he set them into a hard straight line, as I have seen 
him when suffering severe physical pain. 

“ She has accepted you, of course ?” 

Had Curly been less preoccupied, he must have thought 
how huskily and coldly the question was spoken. 

Curly shook his head. 

“No?” exclaimed De Yigne, his eyes lighting up from 
their haughty impassibility into passionate eagerness. 

“No I Plenty of women have loved me, too; yet when 
I am more in earnest than I ever was, I can awaken no 
response. I love her very dearly. Heaven knows, as truly 
and as tenderly as man can love woman. I would give 
her my name, my rank, my riches, were they a thousand 
times greater than they are ; and if I were a poor man I 
would work for her night and day, and think no poverty 
sad, no travail hard, if it were only for her sake. Good 
Heavens I it seems very bitter that love like mine should 
count for nothing, when other men, only seeking to gratify 
their passions or gain their own selfish ends, win all before 
them.” 

His vok;e trembled as he spoke ; his gay and careless 


GRANVILLE LE VIGNE. 


55 


spirits were beaten down ; for the first time in his bright 
butterfly life Sorrow had come upon him. Its touch is 
death, and its breath the chill air of the charnel-house, 
even when we have had it by us waking and sleeping, in 
our bed and at our board, peopling our solitude and 
poisoning our Falernian, rising with the morning sun and 
with the evening stars; — how much heavier then must bo 
the iron hand, how much more chill its breath, ice cold as 
the air of a grave, to one who has never known its pres- 
ence I 

Wer nie sein Brod mit Trlinen ass, 

Wer nicht die kummervollen N'achte. 

Auf seinem Bette weinend sass 

Der kent'euch niclit ihr himlischen Machte. 

Curly’s voice trembled ; he leaned his arm on the dressing- 
table, and his head upon his hand ; his rejection had cut 
him more keenly to the heart than he cared another man 
should see. De Yigne stood still, an eager gladness in 
his eyes, a faint flush of color on the marble-like pallor of 
his face, his heart beating freely and his pulses throbbing 
quickly; that vehement and exultant joy of which his 
nature was capable stirred in him at the thought of Curly’s 
rejection. We never know how we value a thing till its 
loss is threatened I 

He did not answer for some moments; then he laid his 
hand on Curly’s shoulder with that old gentleness he had 
always used to his old Frestonhills favorite. 

“ Dear old fellow, it is hard. I am very ” 

He stopped abruptly ; he would have added, “ sorry for 
you,” but De Yigne knew that he was not sorry in his 
heart, and the innate truth that was in the man checked 
the lie that conventionality would have pardoned. 

Curly threw off his hand and started to his feet. Some- 
thing in De Yigne’s tone struck on his lover’s keen senses 


56 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


with a suspicion that before had never crossed him, ab- 
sorbed as he had been in his own love for the Little Tres- 
sillian, and his own hopes and fears for his favor in her 
eyes. 

“Spare yourself the falsehood,” he said, coldly, as he 
had never spoken before to his idolized “senior pupil.” 
“Commiseration from a rival is simply insult.” 

“A rival ?” repeated De Yigne, that fiery blood of his 
always ready — too ready, at times — to rise up in anger, 
even when not “just,” as Mr. Tapper exacts. 

“Yes, and a successful one, perhaps,” said Curly as 
hotly, for at the sting of jealousy the sweetest temper can 
turn into hate. “You could not say, on your honor, De 
Vigne, that my rejection by her gives you pain. If you. 
did your face would belie you. You love her as well as I ; 
you are jealous over her; perhaps you know that she re- 
turns it; perhaps you have already taken advantage of her 
youth and her ignorance of the world and her trust in you, 
to sacrifice her to your own inconstant passions ” 

“Silence!” said De Yigne, fiercely. “No other man 
would I allow to say such words unpunished. Your very 
supposition is an insult to my honor.” 

“ Do you care nothing for her, then V interrupted Curly. 
Ilis heart was set on the Little Tressillian. He believed 
his rival stood before him, and in such moods men cast 
reason, temperance, old friendship, to the winds. 

The dark passionate blood of his race rose over De 
Yigne’s forehead ; his eyes lighted ; he looked like a lion 
longing to spring upon his foe. He to have his heart 
probed rudely like this — to endure to have his dearest 
secrets dragged to daylight by this boy’s hands — he to be 
questioned, counseled, arraigned in accusation by another 
man I Curly had forgotten his character, or he would 
have hardly thought to gain his secret by provocation and 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


57 


condemnation. De Yigne restrained his anger only by a 
mighty effort of will, and he threw back his hand with that 
haughty gesture and that scornful impatient smile on hia 
delicately cut lips, habitually expressive with him of con 
temptuous irritation. 

“If you came here to cross-question me, you were sin 
gularly unwise. I am not very likely to be patient under 
such treatment. Whatever my feelings might be on any 
subject of the kind, do you suppose it is probable I should 
confide them to you 

So haughtily careless was his tone, that Curly, catching 
at straws as men in love will do, began to hope that De 
Vigne, cold and cynical as he had been to women ever 
since his fatal marriage, might, after all, be indiflerent to 
his protegee. 

“If it be an insult to your honor, then,” he said, eagerly, 
“to hint that you love her, or think of her otherwise than 
as a sister, you can have no objection to do for me what I 
came to ask of you.” 

“What is that?” asked De Vigne, coldly. He could 
not forgive Curly any of his words; if he resented the 
accusation of loving Alma, because it struck harshly on 
what he was always very tenacious over — his confidence 
and his private feelings — and startled him into conscious- 
ness of what he had been unwilling to admit to himself, 
he resented still more the supposition that he cared for 
Alma as a sister, since it involved the deduction that she 
might love him — as a brother ! And that fraternal calm- 
ness of affection ill chimed in with an impetuous nature 
that knew few shades between hate and love, between pro- 
found indifference or entire possession I 

“Alma rejected me!” answered poor Curly; all the un- 
conscious dignity of sorrow was lent to his still girlish 
and Greek-like beauty, and a sadness strangely calm and 


58 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


deep for liis gay insouciant character had settled in Lis 
laughing blue eyes. “I offered her what few men would 
have thought it necessary to offer her, unprotected as she 
is — my name and my rank, such as they are ; and had I 
owned the dignities of an empire, I would have raised her 
to my throne, and thought she graced it. I offered her 
all that a man can, his tenderness, his fidelity, his protec- 
tion. I told her how 1 loved her, and — God help me ! — • 
that is very dearly. Yet she rejected me, though gently 
find tenderly, for she has nothing harsh in her. But some- 
times we know a woman’s refusal is not positive; it may 
come from girlish indecision, caprice, want of thought, 
waywardness, timidity, a hundred things, which afterward 
they may repent, when they remember how rare to find 
true love is in the world. I thought that perhaps (you 
have great influence over her as her grandfather’s friend) 
you could put this before her; persuade her at the least 
not to deny me^ all hope; plead my cause with her; ask 
her to let me wait, — if it were even as long as Jacob for 
Rachel, I would bear it. I would try to be more worthy 
of her, to make her fonder. of me. I would shake o‘ff the 
idleness and uselessness of my present life. I would gain 
a name that would do her honor. I would do anything, 
everything, if only she would give me hope I” 

He spoke fervently and earnestly; pale as death with 
the love that brought no joy upon its wings; his slender 
fair hands clinched in the misery to which he gave no 
utterance; his delicate girlish face stamped pitifully with 
anguish of uncontrollable anxiety, yet with a new nobility 
from the chivalric honor and high devotedness which Alma 
had awakened in him. 

He was silent — and He Yigne as well. He V'igne leaned 
against one of the windows of his bed-room, his face turned 
away from Curly, and his eyes fixed on the gay street 


GRANVILLE PE VIGNE. 


59 


below. He was as pale as his rival, and ne breathed 
shortly and fast. Curly’s words stirred him strangely: 
perhaps they revealed his own heart to him ; perhaps they, 
in their earnestness and unselfishness, contrasted wdth such 
love as he had always known; perhaps they stung him 
with the thought, how much better sheltered from the 
storms of passion and the chill blasts of the world in 
Curly’s bosom, than in his own, would be this fragile and 
soft-winged little dove, now coveted by both. 

He did not answer; Curly repeated his question in low 
tones. 

“ De Yigne ! will you do it ? Will you plead my cause with 
her? If she be so little to you it will cost you nothing I” 
Again he did not answer, the question struck too closely 
home. It woke up in all its force the passion which had 
before slumbered in some unconsciousness. When asked 
to give her to another, he learned how dear she was 
to himself. Hot and jealous by nature as a Southern, 
how could he, though he might be generous and just, plead 
with her to give the joys to his rival of which a cruel fate 
had robbed him ? how could he give the woman he would 
win for himself, away to the arms of another? 

“Answer me, De Vigne. Yes or no ?” 

“No!” 

And haughtily calm as the response was, in his heart 
went up a bitter cry, “God help me. I cannot 
“Then you love her, and have lied I” 

De Yigne sprang forward like a tiger at the hiss of the 
murderous and cowardly bullet that has roused him from 
his lair; the fire of just anger now burned in his dark 
eyes, and his teeth w^ere set like a man who holds his 
vengeance with difficulty in check. Involuntarily he lifted 
his rigtit arm ; another man he would have struck down at 
his feet for that dastard word. But wdth an eflbrt — h^w 


80 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


great ouly those who knew liis nature could appreciate— 
he held his anger in, as he would have held a chafing and 
fiery steed with iron hand upon its reins ; and he lifted his 
grand head with a noble and knightly air: 

“Your love has maddened you, or you would scarcely 
have dared to use that word to me. If I did not pity you, 
and if I had not liked you since you were a little fair-faced 
boy, I should make you answer for that insult in other 
ways than speech. If I icere to love any woman, what 
right have you to dictate to me my actions or dispute my 
will ? You might know of old that I suffer from no man’s 
interference with me and mine.” 

“I have no power to dispute your will,” interrupted 
Curly, “nor to arrest your actions. Would to Heaven I 
had ! But as a man who loves her truly and honorably 
himself, I will tell you, whether I have right or no, that 
no prevarication on your part hides from me that you at 
least share my madness ; and I will tell you, too, though 
you slew me for it to-morrow, that she is too fond, too 
true, too pure to be made the plaything of your fickle 
passions, and cast off when you are weary of her face and 
seek a newer mistress. I will tell you that the man who 
wrongs her trust in him, and betrays her guileless frank- 
ness, will carry a sin in his bosom greater than Cain’s 
fratricide ; and I will tell you that, if you go on as you 
have done from day to day, concealing your marriage, yet 
knitting her heart to yours — if you do not at once reveal 
your history to her, and leave her free to act for herself, 
to love you or to leave you, to save herself from you or to 
sacrifice herself for you, as she please, that for all your 
unstained name and unsuspected honor, 1 shall call you a 
coward !” 

“My God!” muttered De Yigne, “that I should live to 
hear another man speak such words to me. I wonder I do 
»ot kill you where you stand i” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


61 


1 wonder, too, he kept down his wrath even to the point 
he did, for De Yigne’s nature had no trace of the lamb in 
it, and to attack his honor was a worse crime than to attack 
his life. Ilis lips grew white, his eyes black as night, and 
literally lurid with flame; he pressed his hand upon his 
heart — the old gesture he had used in the church at 
Yig^ne upon his marriage-day. Curly stood opposite to 
him, slight and fair as the Slayer of the Python, a deep 
flush on his delicate cheeks, and dark circles under his 
clear blue eyes. Deadly passion was between those two 
men then, sweeping away all ancient memories of boyish 
days, all gentler touches of brighter hours and kinder 
communion. The fatal love of woman had come between, 
cut down, supplanted, and destroyed the friendship of the 
men. Their eyes met — fierce, steady, full of fire, and love, 
and hate; De Yigne’s hand clinched harder on his breast, 
and with the other he signed him to the door. The wildest 
passions were at war within him; his instinct thirsted to 
revenge the first insult he had ever known, yet his kingly 
soul, at the daring that defied him, yielded something like 
that knightly admiration with which the Thirty looked 
upon the Thirty when the sun went down on Carnac. 

“Go — go! I honor you for your defense of her, but 
such words as have passed between us no blood can wash 
out, nor after words efface I” 

Curly bent his head and left him; he had done all he 

could. When they met again 1 Ah I God knows if 

our meetings were foreseen many voices would be softer, 
many farewells warmer, many lips that smile would quiver, 
many eyes that laugh would linger long with salt tears in 
them, many hands would never quit their clasp that touch 
another with light careless grasp, at partings where no 
prescience warns, no second-sight can guide ! 

^Curly left him, and De Yigne threw himself into au 

6 


VOL. ir. 


62 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


arm chair, all the fiery thoughts roused in him beating 
like the strong pinions of chained eagles. The passions 
which had already cost him so much, and which from his 
fatal marriage-day he had vowed should never regain their 
Circean hold upon him, were now let loose, and rioted in 
his heart. He knew that he loved Alma, as he had sworn 
to himself never to love woman. He knew that, strong in 
his own strength, he had gone down before her; that the 
honor and the pride on which he had piqued himself had 
been futile to save him from the danger which he had so 
scornfully derided and recklessly provoked ; that his own 
iron will, on which he had so fearlessly relied, had been 
powerless to hold him back from the old intoxication, 
whose fiery draught had poisoned him even in its sweet- 
ness, and to whose delirium he had vowed never again to 
succumb. He loved Alma passionately, madly, as he 
always had loved, as he always would love, yet with a 
tenfold force and fascination from the vehemence of his 
nature, which had intensified with his maturer manhood ; 
and from the fervor, the truth, the warmth, the delicacy of 
her unusual and winning character — a character w’hich 
ofiered so marked a contrast to the women he had wooed 
before her, where he found no mean between impudence 
and prudery, boldness or affectation ; where either coarse- 
ness courted him, or else mock-modesty chilled him; with 
whom he found passion either a dead letter, or else dis- 
torted into vice ; and in whom he saw no virtue save such 
as was a cover to hideous sins, or dictated by cold pru- 
dence and conventional selfishness, and a wise regard to 
their own social interests. 

He loved her, and He Vigne was not a man cold enough, 
or, as the world would phrase it, virtuous enough, to say 
to the woman he idolized, “Flee from me — society will not 
smile upon our love !” Yet his knowledge that there h{^ 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


63 


arisen between them that “lovely and fearful thing-* grafted 
in us by nature and inherited with life ; that love which, 
blessed, gives “greenness to the grass and glory to the 
flower,” and, cursed, blights all creation with its breath; 
came to him with bitter thoughts more like the heritage 
of woe than joy. Many of Curly’s words had struck into 
his brain with marks of fire. “Going on as you have 
done day by day, deceiving her by concealment of your 
marriage, yet knitting her heart to yours !” These stung 
him cruelly, for, of all things, De Yigne abhorred conceal- 
ment or cowardice; of all men he was most punctilious in 
his ideas of truth and honor, and his conscience told him 
that had he acted straightforwardly, or, for her, wisely, he 
would have let Alma know, in the earliest days of their 
intimacy, of the cruel ties of church and laws that fettered 
him with so uncongenial and so unmerited a chain. True, 
he had never concealed it from, bad motives; it was solely 
his disgust at every thought of the Trefusis, and the semi- 
oblivion into which — never seeing his wife to remind him 
of it — the bare fact of his so-called marriage had sunk, 
which had prevented his revealing it to Alma. He had 
never thought the matter would be of consequence to her; 
he had looked on her as a mere acquaintance, and it had 
no more occurred to him to tell her his history than it had 
done to talk it over in the clubs. You must know by this 
time as well as I that De Yigne was as reserved as he was 
impatient of all meddling with his concerns; still, that im- 
putation of want of candor, of lacking to a young girl the 
honor he had been ever so scrupulous in yielding to men, 
stung him to the quick. Other words, too, lingered on his 
mind, bringing with them that keen, sharp pain, that 
stifling, agonized longing for certainty, like the parched 
thirst for water in a desert, that fastens on us with the 
doubt of our love being fully answered. “If you only 


64 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


think of her as a sister,’^ chilled him with a breath of ice: 
for the first time it suggested to him that Alma, frank, 
fond, demonstrative as she was to him, might also think 
of him as — a brother. She was always gay and candid 
with him; she always showed him without disguise her 
delight in his presence, her grief at his absence ; she said 
everything to him that entered her mind, and spoke out of 
her heart to him fearlessly and lovingly. There was none 
of the orthodox timidity, reserve, and blushing confusion 
popularly and poetically associated with the dawn of love 
— signs such as De Vigne had seen, either natural or af- 
fected, in most women. Perhaps Alma’s frankness and 
fondness \7Qve too demonstrative to be deep ; perhaps the 
affection she felt for him was the gay, grateful alfection of 
a young girl for a man who had been her kindest friend 
and most congenial companion, not the ardent and impas- 
sioned love of which he knew, by her eyes and her charac- 
ter, Alma would some day be capable. The doubt was to 
him like the bitterness of death. It should not have been, 
we know, had he been unselfish as he ought; he should 
have prayed for punishment to fall upon his head, and 
for her to be spared the fruits of his own imprudence; but 
what man among us can put his hand upon his heart, and 
say before God that he could have summoned up such un- 
selfishness under such a temptation? Not I — not you 

not Granville De Vigne, for, as Sabretasche would have 
said, we are unhappily mortal, mon ami ! 

The doubt was as the bitterness of death, yet he knew 
that for her sake he ought to wish that the doubt might be 
solved against him. Heaven knows, he suffered enough in 
that hell of thought, whose tortures far excel the material 
hell of Milton or of Dante ! Remorse for his own obstinacy 
of will, which would see no danger for himself in his care- 
less intercourse with an attractive woman whom he per- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


t)6 

Bisted in regarding as a winning child ; — regret for his de- 
falcation in that straightforward honor and uncompromising 
truth which had been his guiding star and idol through all 
his life ; — agony at the memory of that mad marriage which 
now deprived him of his right of liberty and free action 
through the fetters flung over him by an arch-intriguante, 
whose crime was upheld by an illiberal church and cruel 
laws; — dread anxiety to know whether or not Alma Tres- 
sillian loved him, though how that love might end for both 
he never paused to ask; — all these made a tempest in his 
heart fiercer even than that which had raged there on the 
fatal day whose after-consequences had chained his hands 
and ruined his manhood. 

One resolution he made amid the whirl of thoughts and 
feelings which the stormy scene with Curly had so unex- 
pectedly called into life — that was to tell her of his mar- 
riage at once, or, rather, (for marriage it was not,) of the 
false system of society and the iron fetters of a tie which 
could be as nothing in the eyes of reason and justice, 
which now held him back from the only true marriage-^ 
where love secures fidelity and heart weds heart — rare 
enough, God knows I — too rare to be forbidden by man to 
man I He resolved to tell her, fiery as his struggle was 
with himself; for the name of The Trefusis was hateful to 
him to breathe, even to those who knew his history. Per- 
haps there mingled with it some thought that by Alma’s 
reception of it he would see how little or how much she 
cared for him. I know not; if there w'ere, I dare throw no 
stone at him. How many of my motives — how many ot 
yours — of any man’s, are unmixed and undefiled ? He re- 
solved to tell her, to be cold and guarded with her, to let 
her see no sign or shadow of the passion she had awakened. 
All his past warnings had failed to teach him wisdom; he 
still trusted in his own strength, still believed his will 

6 * 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


powerful enough to hold his love down without word or 
token of it, while it gnawed at his heart-strings in the 
very presence of the woman who had awakened it! Once 
more Granville De Yigne had gone down before his old 
foe and siren, Passion; like Sisera before the treacherous 
wife of Heber the Kenite, at her feet he bowed and fell — 
and in that strange delirium men “ know not what they do I” 


PART THE EIGHTEENTH. 

I. 


THE ORDEAL BY FIRE. 

The summer day was beautifully soft and sultry as he 
rode down the road to Richmond. A thunder-storm in the 
early morning had purified but not chilled the air ; the roads 
were sparkling still with moisture ; the grasses, heavy with 
dew, glittered like emeralds in the sunlight; the little birds 
were twittering and singing in sweet abrupt gushes and 
trills of impromptu music; the deer in the park lifted their 
head now and then for a clear bell of delight, and trooped- 
with stately grace along the scented turf into the shadows 
of the trees, which moved their glistening leaves at the low 
summer wind, as it shook olf from their luxuriant foliage 
noiseless showers of rain drops, that fell with silent foot- 
falls on the fern branches below. 

There was the glorious beauty of the “glad summer- 
time ” in the fragrant air, and on the moistene-d roads, and 
on the rich sylvan breath of the green woodlands, but it 
never reached his eyes, or heart, or senses, deeply as at 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


a 


another time it would have stirred his inborn love of nature, 
as De Vigne rode on, spurring his horse into a mad gallop, 
with that one world within him which blinds a man to all 
the rest of earth. He galloped on and on, never slackening 
his pace ; for the first time in all his soldier’s life he felt 
di'ead — dread of telling the woman he loved that he was 
tied to the woman he hated ; not for the first time, yet 
quicker than ever before, his pulse throbbed, and his heart 
beat loudly and rapidly, at the thought of the Little Tres- 
sillian. They throbbed much faster, and beat much quicker 
still, as he came in sight of the farm-house of St. Crucis, 
and saw coming out of the little gate, and taking his 
horse’s bridle off the post — Vane Castleton. 

“Good Heavens!” thought De Vigne, with a deadly an- 
guish tightening at his heart, “is she, then, like the rest? 
Has she duped us all ? Is her guileless frankness as great 
a lie as other women’s artifice ?” 

Castleton did not see him; he threw himself across his 
bay and rode down the opposite road. De Vigne wavered 
a moment; skeptical as he was, he was almost ready to 
turn his horse’s head and leave her, never to see her again. 
If she chose Vane Castleton, let him have her! But 
love conquered ; the girl’s face had grown too dear to him 
for him of his own act never to look upon it again. He 
Hung his bridle over the gate, pushed the little wicket open, 
and entered the garden. In the window, with her eyes 
lifted upward to a lark singing far above in the blue ether, 
the chestnut-boughs hanging over her in their dark- green 
framework, the honey-suckles and china roses bending down 
till they touched her shining golden hair, her cheeks a 
little flushed, and on her young face all that vivid intelli- 
gence, refined delicacy, and impassionate feeling which 
formed her strongest, because her rarest, charm for him, 
was Little Alma. At the sight of her, he trembled like a 


68 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


woman, with the passion that had grown silently up, and 
ripened into such sudden force from the night of the Moly- 
neux ball. IIow could he give her up to any living man ? 
'Right or wrong, how could he so tame down his inborn 
nature as to wish to yin from such a woman only the calm, 
chill affection of a sister ? 

That mad jealousy which almost always accompanies 
strong love, especially when that love is uncertain of 
having awakened any response, and which had awoke in 
all its fire at the sight of Vane Castleton, and the suspi- 
cion that it was for Castleton’s sake and not for his own 
that she had rejected Curly’s suit, drove all memory of The 
Trefusis, all recollection of what he came to avow to Alma, 
from his mind ! 

He stood and looked at her — the wild throbbing of his 
heart, the rush of all that inexpressible delirium, half 
rapture and half suffering, which, for long years, none of 
her sex had had the power to rouse in him, told him that 
he should not dare to trust himself in her presence, for no 
will, however strong, could have strength enough to tame 
its fever down and chill his veins into ice-water. Still he 
lingered, not master of himself; the unnatural calmness, 
the acquired self-control with which he had of late banished, 
and, as he believed, silenced forever those warmer and 
fonder impulses that had been born with him, were lost. 
The man’s nature, alive and vigorous, rebelled against the 
stoicism he had thought to graft upon it, and flung off tho 
cold and alien bonds of the chill philosophy circumstance i 
had taught him to adopt. His heart was made for the 
passionate joys of love; and against the reason of his 
mind it demanded its rights and clamored for his freedom. 
He lingered there, loth — who can marvel ? — to close upon 
himself the golden gates of a fuller, sweeter, more glorious 
existence ; and turn away to bear an unmerited curse 


GRANVILLE DE VXGNE. 


69 


alone — a wanderer from that Eden which was his rignt and 
heritage as a man. He lingered — then she looked up and 
saw him, her lips parted with a low, glad cry, the rose flush 
deepened in her cheeks, the first blush she had ever given 
for him. She sprang down from the window, which was 
scarcely a foot above the ground, ran across the lawn as 
lightly as a fawn, and stood by his side. 

“Oh, Sir Folko ! how long you have been away !” 

How could he leave her then? If he could have done, 
I fancy he would have been one of the impossible creations 
of romance, pulseless and bloodless as marble gods — not 
one of the warm, impulsive, erring sons of earth, a man, as 
I say, of like passions with ourselves. 

She came and stood by him; her golden hair nearly 
touching his arm, her little soft fingers still on his hand, 
her glad beaming face turned up to his with the full glow 
of the afternoon sunshine upon it, her eyes raised with 
joyous tenderness in their clear regard, yet far down in their 
dark-blue depths, that enthusiasm, sensitiveness, and inten- 
sity of feeling of which the heart that shone through them 
was capable. She stood by him, only thinking of her hap- 
piness at seeing him, never dreaming of the torture her 
presence was to him — a torment yet an ecstasy, like the 
exultation and the awakening of an opium-smoker com- 
bined ill one. Seeing her thus, with her hand in his, her 
eyes lo'oking upward to him, so near to her that he could 
count every breath that parted her soft warm lips, it was 
hard foi him to keep stern and cold to her, repress the 
words that hung upon his lips, chain down the impulse that 
rose in him, with irresistible longing, to take her to his heart 
and carry her far away where no man could touch her, and 
no false laws deny him the love that was his common 
birthright among men. 

“What a long time you have been away, Sir Folko F* 

2k 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


"jO 

began Alma again. “Ten whole daysl You have never 
been to see me since that beautiful ball. I thought you 
were sure to come the next day, or the day after, at latest. 
Have you been out of town 

“ Oh no !” said De Vigne, moving toward the house 
without looking at her. 

“Then why have you been so long?” 

“ I have been engaged, and you have had plenty of other 
visitors,” he answered, his jealousy of Vane Castleton 
working up into a bitterness he could not wholly conceal. 

She colored. Looking aside at her, he saw the flush in 
her cheeks. She had never looked confused before at any 
words of his, and he put it down, not to his own abrupt- 
ness, but to the memory of his rival. 

“No visitors whom I care for,” said Alma, with that 
pretty petulance which became her so well. “I have told 
you till I am tired of telling you that nobody makes up, or 
ever could make up, to me for your absence !” 

How his heart glowed at her reply 1 But the devil ol 
jealousy was not lulled so easily, wayward as he always 
had been from his cradle, and suspicious as his life now 
had made him. 

“Still, when I am absent,” he said, with that satire 
which with him was often a veil to very deep feeling, “you 
can console yourself very agreeably with other men.” 

They had now passed into her room. He leant against 
the side of the winaow, playing impatiently with sprays of 
the honey-suckle and clematis that hung round it, snapping 
the sprays and throwing the fragrant flowers recklessly on 
the grass outside the sill, careless of the ruin of beauty he 
was causing. She stood opposite to him, stroking the 
parrot’s scarlet crest unconsciously — she and her bird mak- 
ing a brilliant picture. 

His words touched her into something like his own 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


71 


mingled anger and satire, for their natures had certain 
touches in common, as all natures have that assimilate and 
sympathize ; and Alma’s temper, though very sweet, could 
be passionate at provocation or injustice. 

*‘If I thought so,” she answered, quickly, “I should not 
honor the woman I suspected of such falsehood and such 
variability by any visits at all from me, were I you.” 

“Is that a hint to me to leave your new friend Castleton 
the monopoly ?” asked De Vigne, between his teeth. 

“Sir Folko!” 

That was all she deigned to answer — her eyes flashing 
fire in their dark-blue depths, her cheeks hot as the crimson 
roses above her head, her expressive lips full of tremulous 
indignation, her attitude, all fire and grace and outraged 
pride, said the rest. There was fascination about her then 
sufficient to madden any man who loved her. 

“Would you try to make me believe, then, that you do 
not know that man Castleton loves you — what he calls 
love, at least?” asked De Vigne, fiercely. 

Alma’s cheeks glowed to a warmer crimson still, and 
resentment at his tone flashed from under her black lashes, 
like azure lightning. He had put her passions up now. 

“You must be mad to speak to me in that tone. I bear 
no imputation of a falsehood even from you. I do not 
suppose Lord Vane loves me, as you phrase it. From the 
little I know of him, I should fancy him infinitely too vain 
and too egotistical to love any woman whatsoever. That he 
flatters me, and would talk more foolish nonsense still, I 
know ; but that is scarcely to my taste, as you, I should 
have thought, might have believed, and ” 

“You will be very unwise if you give ear or weight to 
nis ‘foolish nonsense;’ many a girl as young and as fair as 
yon have been ruined by listening to it,” interrupted De 
V'igne, without waiting for her explanation. He was so 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


^|2 

mad that Vane Castleton should even have dreamt that 
he would win her; he was so rife with passions wild and 
reckless, that, rather than stand calmly by the girl, he must 
upbraid her; and the storm that was in his heart found 
vent in cruel and sarcastic words, being denied the softer 
and natural outlet of love, vows and fond caresses. The 
love that murdered Desdemona, and condemned Heloise to 
a living death, is not dead in the world yet. “Yane Cas- 
tleton can love, not as you idealize it, perhaps, but as he 
holds it. There is no man so brutal, so heartless, or so 
egotistical, but can love — as he translates the word, at 
least — for his own private ends or selfish gratification. 
‘Love Ms men’s amusement, like horse-racing, or gaming, 
or drinking, and you would not find that ‘bad men’ abstain 
from it — rather the contrary, I am afraid! Yane Castle- 
ton will love you, I dare say, if you let him, very dearly — 
for a month or two !” 

How bitterly he spoke, holding his hand upon his chest, 
and breathing hard, as he looked away from her out into 
the glad summer sunshine, lying so sweetly and brightly 
upon the turf and on the chestnut-boughs. 

Alma gazed at him, her large eyes wide open, like a 
startled gazelle's, her cheeks crimson with the blush his 
manner and his subject awoke. 

“ Sir Folko, what has come to you ? Are you mad ‘f” 

“Perhaps,” said De Yigne, between his teeth — set, as he 
would set them in the wild work of a charge or a skirmish, 
“All I say is, that you are unwise to receive Castleton’s 
visits and listen to his flattering compliments. Many 
women have rued them. I can tell you that men very un- 
scrupulous in such affairs, the last to condemn, the first to 
give license and latitude, have called him Butcher, for his 
gross brutality — sleek and soft as he looks — to a girl no 
older <»hau yourself, whose boy brother he shot dead through 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


73 


the heart. You would have been wiser to have taken 
Curl>’s honest affection; there are few honest hearts upon 
earth, and there the world would have gone with you, 
society \Tould have smiled on your love, and prudence and 
propriety and wisdom upheld you in your choice ” 

“Sir Folko! What right have you to speak to me 
like this?’’ interrupted Alma, with a passionate gesture. 
“What right have you to suppose that I should listen to 
Yane Castleton, or any other man? If you had listened 
to me you would have heard that his fulsome compliments 
are detestable to me, and that I hate them and loathe 
them, that I told him so this very afternoon, and that I shall 
have strangely mistaken him if ever he repeats his visits 
here again. How could you, knowing me as you do, or as 
you ought to do, presume to doubt that I could find 
pleasure in flattery that I, at least, think no compliment ? 
Still more, how could you dream that I, having seen you, 
could tolerate him, or any other man ? • Do you think that 
society and prudence weigh with me ? Do you suppose 
that love I could not return -vould have any temptation for 
me, even where it is as true and generous as I believe 
Colonel Brandling’s to be? Do you think that I could 
endure the iron bondage of marriage with a man for whom 
I cared nothing, however it might be gilded over with the 
glare of rank and riches and position ? What harm have 
you heard of me to make you all at once class me with the 
women you satirize and ridicule? Would you wish to 
give me over to your friend ? Would you think so meanly 
of me as to Oh, Sir Folko, Heaven forgive you !” 

She stood beside him passionate as a little Pythoness, 
with all the fervor of her moiety of Italian nature awoke 
and aroused ; her cheeks crimson with her indignation, her 
grief, and her vehemence, her lips just parted with their 
rush of words, her head thrown back in defiance, her little 

7 


VOL. II. 


f4 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE: 


while hands clinched together, yet on her face a eery an- 
guish of pain, and in her large brilliant eyes inexpressible 
tenderness, reproach, and wistful agony. Her gaze was 
fixed upon him even while her heart heaved with the 
fresh and vehement burst of new emotions his words had 
aroused; and tears, passionate and bitter, rose in her 
throat and gathered in her eyes — those tears of blood, the 
tears of woman’s love. All his passion surged up in He 
Yigne’s heart with resistless force ; all that burning love 
for her which had crept into his heart with such insidious 
stealth, and burst into such sudden flame but a few hours 
before, mastered and conquered him. In all her strange 
and brilliant fascination, in all her fond and childlike frank- 
ness, in all her newly-dawned and impassioned tenderness 
she stood before him ; his heart throbbed wildly, the hot 
blood mounted to his pallid brow in the fierceness of the 
struggle, the olden delirium fastened on him with more in- 
toxication than ever in days gone by, even in that for whose 
price he had paid down his name, his honor, and his free- 
dom. Will, power, reason, self-control were shivered to the 
winds ; he was no statue of clay, no sculptured god of stone, 
to resist such fierce temptation — to pass over and reject all 
for which nature, and manhood, and tenderness pleaded — • 
to put away with unshaken hand the love for which every 
fiber of his being yearned. 

She stood before him in all her witchery of womanhood, 
and before her De Yigne’s strength bowed down and fell ; 
the love within him wrestled with and overthrew him ; every 
nerve of his nature thrilled and throbbed, every vein seemed 
turned to fire; he seized her in his arms where she stood, 
he crushed her slight form against his heart in an embrace 
long and close enough for a farewell, while he covered her 
flushed cheeks and soft warm lips with “lava kisses melt- 
ing while they burned.” He needed no words to tell he 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


T5 


was loved; between them now there was an eloquence 
compared to which all speech is dumb. 

The glowing golden sunlight shone on them where they 
stood, two human beings formed for each other’s joy. To 
those who condemn him, all I answer is, “Those whom 
God hath joined together let no man put asunder !” God 
and nature had joined their hearts together in the higher 
bonds of love, enduring and eternal ; it was man’s meddling 
and Pharisaic laws which dared to decree they should be 
put asunder. 

Those moments of deep rapture passed uncounted by 
De Vigne, conscious only of that ecstasy of which he had 
been robbed so long, which was to his heart as the flowing 
of water-springs through a dry land ; all the outer world 
was forgotten by him, all his unnatural and cruel ties faded 
from his memory, all he knew was that once more he was 
loved on this weary life — so weary without love; all he felt 
was the wild pulsations of the heart he held imprisoned 
against his own, whose throbs were all for him ; all he re- 
membered was that he loved and was loved I Holding her 
still in his arms he leaned against the side of the window, 
the soft summer wind fanning their brows, flushed with their 
mutual joy; his passion spending itself in bfoken sighs and 
deep delight, and hurried words and fond caresses. 

“You love me, Alma?” he whispered eagerly, bending 
his haughty head to look into the eyes whose loving radi- 
ance answered him without words. 

“ Forever !” she murmured, as fervently, looking up into 
his face, while warm blushes tinged her cheeks and brow. 
“IIow could I help but love you in joy or in sorrow, in 
death or in life; you, the realization of all my best ideals; 
you, to whom I owe all the happiness of my being; you, 
who have haunted all ray sweetest dreams ever since my 
earliest childhood ? Love you ? How could I choose but 
love you ?” 


78 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Sbe paused abruptly with a deep-drawn sigh of joy, awcd 
at the depth and vehemence of her own love, looking ap in 
his face with those eloquent guileless eyes, in which lay all 
the tenderness, ardent yet undefiled, which he had awakened 
in her pure but impassioned heart. How could he remem- 
ber aught else when love like this was offered him; how 
could he think of anything save the heaven shrined for 
him in those fond words and loving eyes? He clasped her 
closer still against his breast, pressing his lips on hers with 
the passionate fire of his vehement nature. 

“My God 1 if you love me like this, how do I love you I 
Would to Heaven I could reward you for it I” 

Alma, who knew not his thoughts or his meaning, 
looked up with a smile, half shy, half mournful, yet in- 
expressibly beautiful, with its frank gladness and deep 
tenderness. 

“Ah, what reward is there like your love ?” 

He Yigne kissed her lips to silence ; he dare not listen 
to the eloquence that lured him in its unconscious inno- 
cence with such fierce temptation. For, now that the first 
moments of wild rapture had passed, the memory of his 
marriage, of his resolves, of his duty, shown him by a much 
younger, and m such matters equally latitudinarian a man, 
and acknowledged to himself, by reason and honor, justice 
and generosity, of his right to tell her fully and freely of 
the fetters that held him, and the hateful woman that 
Church and Law decreed to be, though heart and nature 
refused ever to acknowledge as, his wife ; all these rushed 
on him, and stood between him and his new-won heaven, 
as we have seen the dark and spectral shadow-form of the 
Hartz Mountains rise up cold and grim between us and 
the sweet rose-hued dawn which is breaking over the bills 
and valleys, and chasing away with its golden glories the 
poisonous shades and shapes of night. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


T-! 


He had no power to end with his own hand this fresh 
and glorious existence which had opened before him. If 
he had ended with absinthe or with laudanum his own life, 
men would have prosed sermons over him, and printed his 
condemnation in glaring letters; yet, alas for charity or 
judgment 1 they would have condemned him equally because 
he shrank from this far worse and more cruel self-murder 
— the assassination of love, the suicide of the soul. By 
Heaven ! men need be gods to conform to all the laws of 
men. We must love life so well, that when it is at its 
darkest, its loneliest, brimful with misery, bitter and poison- 
ous as hemlock, we must never, in our crudest hours of 
solitude, feel for an instant tempted to flee from its fret 
and anguish to the silent sleep of the tomb ; yet — we must 
love it so little, that when it smiles the sweetest, when it is 
fair as the dawn and generous as the sunshine, when it has 
led us from the dark and pestilent gloom of a charnel- 
house back to a laughing and joyous earth, when it has 
turned our tears into smiles, our sorrow into joy, our soli- 
tude into a heaven of delight, then with an unhesitating 
hand we are to put aside the glorious cup of life, and turn 
away, without one backward glance from our loved Eden, 
into the land of darkness, of silence, and of tears. Alas ! 
if God be as harsh to us as man is to his fellow-man ! He 
Yigne’s life, for the first time since long long years, was 
full of that delirious rapture for which his nature, knowing 
no medium between cold indifference or tropical passion, 
was formed, and for which his heart, so alien to the chill 
stoicism he had perforce tried to acquire, had longed and 
thirsted. In his extreme youth the love of women had 
been his chief temptation and his favorite plaything. It 
was very certain in his vigorous manhood, with all its 
ripened passions and intensified emotions, to become, when 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


;8 


oncA lie yielded to it, his dearest delirium and sweetest 
ecstasy. Can you wonder that in its most delicious mo- 
ments of first confession his courage failed him to shadow 
it with a cloud ; much more to tell what might dash it for- 
ever from his lips; much more still to say sternly to the 
woman who worshiped him those bitterest of words spoken 
by human lips, “We must part?” 

He was so happy ! He could not choose but cast behind 
him the curse of his cruel ties. He was so happy I with 
that rapturous and tumultuous happiness born from the 
joy of a lingering caress, or the first vows of a newly-won 
love, that does not pause to count its treasures, or seek 
the springs of its delight, or ask how long its heaven will 
last, or by what right its heaven has been gained. It was 
a happiness, passionate, restless, vehement, like his natural 
character. He was not easy unless she was gathered in his 
arms, as if afraid that fate might tear her from him. He 
was never weary of making her repeat her fond assurances 
of the love she bore him. He was exigeant in his love, 
and it was well that Alma’s for him was so deep and warm 
that with her melange of childlike frankness and woman’s 
passion she responded fully to the bursts of intense tender- 
ness which he lavished upon her — tenderness all the more 
intense for the uncertainty of its tenure, and the gloom 
which seemed to hang around it, as tempest-clouds hang- 
ing above the western sky at sunset make by force of con- 
trast the rose-hued glow of golden rays still warmer and 
more brilliant. 

All about and around them nature spoke of Love. The 
gorgeous and sultry day slumbered softly in the voluptuous 
summer air. The dark-green chestnut-boughs bent down- 
ward with the weight of their own beauty, while amid 
their white blossoms the thrush and goldfinch sang glad 
yet tremulous love-songs. The rich glow of the luxurious 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


.79 


Buraraer-tirae lay on the eartli in all its fragrant glory, while 
the scented limes, waving up to the deep azure sky above, 
and the crimson roses, their blushing petals siill wet with 
the tears of ecstasy the clouds had shed when passing on 
forever from their loveliness, stirred in the low breeze, and 
filled the air with a dreamy luxuriance of odor. 

All nature spoke of Love, yet of love more fully blest 
and less passionate than the mortal’s who gazed upon it. 
Its beauty and its peace were at war with the fiery passions 
in his heart; its eternal calm irritated him, even while its 
voluptuous warmth and loveliness stole over his senses, 

“How well do you love me, Alma?” he said, abruptly, 
as they sat beside the open bay-window, his arms still 
round her, her soft small hands held in his, her head, with 
its golden and perfumed hair, leaning against his breast, 
her eyes sometimes drooped under their long black lashes, 
more often raised to his with their fervent, trustful gaze, 
and on her face the flush of joy too deep to last. 

“How well do I love you?” she repeated, with her old, 
arch, amused smile playing round her lips. “ Tell me, first, 
how many petals there are in those roses, how many leaves 
on the chestnut-boughs, how many feathers in that butter- 
^y’s wings — then, perhaps, I may tell you how well I love 
^ou, Sir Folko !” 

De Yigne could not but smile at the poetry and en- 
thusiasm of the reply — so like Alma herself; but as he 
smiled he sighed impatiently. 

“I am ‘Si: Folko’ no longer, Alma; the name was never 
appropriate,. I have always told you I am no stainless 
knight. Call me Granville. I have no one to give me 
the old familiar name now.” 

“Granville I” murmured Alma, repeating the name to 
herself, with a deeper flush on her cheeks. “Granville I 
Yes, it is a beautiful name, and I love it because it is yours; 


80 


GRANVTLLI^ DE VIGNE. 


yet I love Sir Folko best, because others have called you 
Granville before me, but ‘Sir Folko’ is all my own I” 

Her innocent speech stung him to the heart; he re- 
membered how truth, and honor, and justice demanded of 
him to tell her who had “called him Granville before her.” 

“Still, if you like it best, it is everything to me,” she 
went on responding to her own thoughts. “Granville I 
You will be that to me, and Major I)e Yigne to all the 
rest of the world, won’t you? it makes me seem nearer to 
you; but I must call you Sir Folko sometimes.” 

She spoke so naturally — as if all their future would be 
spent together I lie interrupted her almost hastily: 

“But you have not answered my question. How much 
do you love me? Come, tell me 1” 

“How can I tell you?” she answered, looking np in his 
face with that smile so tender that it was almost mournful. 
“ It seems to me that n-o one could ever have loved as I 
do you. My earliest memories are of you ; every recollec- 
tion is of some noble or generous act of yours ; you realize 
my noblest ideals; you are twined into my every thought 
and wish ; you fill my dreams by night and day ;^n spirit 
I am always with you, and without you my life is dark 
and dreary as a desert. How much do I love you ? Oh I 
I will tell you when you number the rose-leaves or count 
the river waves, then, but not till then, could I ever gauge 
my love for you I” 

He pressed her closer to him, yet he asked a cruel ques- 
tion : 

“But if 1 left you now — if I were ordered on foreign 
service, for instance, and died in battle, could you not find 
fresh happiness without me ?” 

She clung to him, all her radiant joy banished, her face 
white and her eyes wild with a prescient dread : 

“ Oh 1 why do you torture me so ? Such jests are cruel 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


81 


You know that you are the life of my life, and Lhat no 
other man, even had you never cared for me, would ever 
have been anything to me. I do not tell you I would die 
for you, that is a hackneyed phrase not fit for deep and 
earnest love like ours, though. Heaven knows, existence 
would be no sacrifice if given up to serve you; but I 
would live for you — I will live for you as no woman ever 
lived for man. I will increase all talents God has given 
me that you may be prouder of me; I will try and root 
out all my faults, that you may love me better. If ever 
you lose your wealth, as rich men have done, I will work 
for you, and glory in my task. To share the pomp of 
others would be misery, to share your poverty, joy. I will 
pray to Heaven that I may always be beautiful in your 
eyes; but if you ever love another, do not tell me, but kill 
me, as Alarcos slew his wife : to lose my life would be 
sweeter than to lose your love. If war calls you, I will 
follow — death and danger would have no terror by your 
side — and if you died in battle, I would be truer to you, 
till we met beyond the grave, than woman ever was to any 
living love. But — my God ! you know how well I love 
you; why do you torture me thus?” 

She had spoken with all that impassioned fervor natural 
to her, but passion so intense treads close on anguish ; all 
the soft bloom of youth and joy forsook her lips, and her 
head drooped upon her bosom, which heaved with uncon- 
trollable sobs. Poor child ! she had shed bitter tears in 
her short life, but these were the first of those waters of 
Marah which flow side by side with the hot springs of Pas- 
sion. De Yigne pressed her with almost fierce tenderness 
to his heart, lifted her face to his, and called back the rose- 
hued light of life to her cheeks and brow with breathless 
caresses, as if he would repay with that mute eloquence 
the perfect love which touched him too deeply to answer it 


82 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


iir woids. It struck far down into his heart, stirring all its 
long-sealed depths, this noble, generous, and high-souled 
love now felt for him. All its devotion and heroism; all 
its unselfishness, and warmth, and trust; all the diviner 
essence which breathed in it, marking it out from man’s 
and woman’s ordinary loves, brutal on the one side, exigeant 
and egotistical on the other ; all the high devotedness and 
impassioned fervor upon her speaking face, struck home to 
the better nature of De Vigne, and there came upon him 
a mortal anguish of regret that with this noble, frank, and 
lender heart he should give nothing but gain all; that it 
would be he who would ask sacrifices of her, not she who 
would receive at his hands the rank and honor and position 
which he would have delighted in showering on her, not 
for the world’s sake, but as gages of his own love. To 
him, generous-hearted even to his foes, liberal where he 
was most indifferent, not to be able to recompense this 
perfect love with the only reward a man can give the 
woman dearest to him — to be compelled to ask one who 
trusted him so entirely and loved him so unselfishly to sac- 
rifice herself for him, and live under a social ban for his 
sake, was pain bitter and inexpressible. Yet with it all 
was a delicious joy at finding himself so loved, a delirious 
rapture at the response so ardent, yet so delicate, which 
she gave to his own passion — how could he leave her now ? 
— how could he, even without thought of himself, send her 
from his arms into the chill unloving world? — how could 
he consign her to the death in life which she had told him 
existence without him would be to her now? His heart 
was at once a very hell and heaven within him ; passionate 
joy to be so loved, mingling passionate regret to be denied, 
by his own past folly, from rewarding such a love with the 
honor and the name it merited. In its struggling he lav- 
ished on her all the vehement fondness that a man ever 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


83 


{>^>*^rcd on the object of his idolatry ; in ihose few hours 
shv had grown unutterably dear to him, though, save a few 
murmured and feverish words, his passions were too strong 
to form themselves to speech. But one other question 
he out to her : 

'Darling, if you love me like this, would you be content 
wKn me for your sole companion, away from the hum of 
men and the pleasures of society, alone in an Eden of the 
heart ?” 

bhe thought that he was doubting and trying her, and 
laughed a low joyous laugh, looking up in his face with an 
arch mischief, with something of her old mechancete, 
hashed for a time into a deeper happiness. 

“1 shall not answer you. You are a great deal too 
exigeant 1 Do you want me to flatter you any more ?’’ 

“I'io, but I wish you to tell me,” answered De Yigne, 
with his impatient persistence, looking with his whole soul 
into her upraised eyes, and awing her childlike gayety 
with the depth and vehemence of his own fiery heart. 
“For me, with me, could you bear the world’s sneer? 
With the warmth of love around you, would you care what 
the world said of you ? Should I be sufficient for you if 
others look coldly and neglected you ?” 

Even now his literal meaning did not occur to her; she 
neither knew nor dreamt of any ties that bound him ; and 
she still thought he was trying to see how little or how 
much she loved him. 

“Why do you ask me?” she said, almost impatiently, 
her eyes growing dark and humid with her great love for 
him. “You know well enough that ‘for you,’ and ‘with 
you,’ are talismans all-powerful with me. Your smile is 
my sole joy, your coldness my sole sorrow. While you 
were with me the world’s frowns would be nothing; if I 
were happy, what should care how the chill winds blew 


84 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


without, so as they touched not me and what I loved ? 
You are all the world to me; in such a life 1 should not 
be the one to weary. Sir Folko — Granville, why will you 
doubt me 

“I do not doubt you I It would be better for you if 
your love were less true, or mine more worthy of it. Oh, 
j^lmal Alma! would to God we had met earlier!” 

But she did not hear his muttered words, nor see the hot 
tears that stood in his haughty and lustrous eyes: tears 
wrung from his very heart’s depths ; tears of gratitude, 
regret, remorse, and wholly of tenderness, as he bent over 
her, pressing his burning lips to her flushed brow and soft 
cheeks, warm with a feverish glow, the glow of joy, pre- 
destined not to last. 

And now the sun was near his setting, and all the earth 
was brilliant with the imperial glories that attend the gor- 
geous burial of a summer day. Mingling rays of crimson 
and of glow stretched across the deep-blue sky, and steep- 
ing in light the snow-white fleecy clouds that rose up on 
the horizon, like the silvery mountain range of some far-off 
and Arcadian land. The roses glowed a deeper hue, the 
chestnut-boughs drooped nearer to the earth, intoxicatea 
with their own beauty; the flowers hung their lovely heads, 
drunk with the nectar of the evening dew; the birds were 
gone to sweetest sleep, rocked by the warm west wind ; the 
delicious odor from the closed flower-buds and perfumed 
lime-leaves filled the air with a still more exquisite odor, 
while already on the warm and radiant day descended the 
tender and voluptuous night. 

The sunset hour, when the busy day still lingers on the 
earth, bowed down with the weight of sins and sorrows 
with which in one brief twelve hours the sons of men have 
laden her, and the night falls down with noiseless wing from 
heaven, to lay her soft hand on weary human eyes, and lead 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


85 


tliera iuto dream-land, to rest awhile from toil and care, is 
ever full of Nature’s deepest poetry. The working man at 
sunset leaves his plow and his hard toil for daily Dread, 
and catches one glimpse of God’s great mystery of beauty, 
as he sees the evening dew glisten in the dying eyes of the 
flowers his plow has slain. The Ave Maria at sunset wings 
its solemn chant over the woods and mountains, golden in 
G od’s own light, and mingles its human worship with the 
pure voiceless prayer of the fair earth. The soul of man 
at sunset shakes off the dust of the working world, and 
with its rest has time to listen to the sweeter under notes 
and more spiritual harmonies which lie under the rushing 
current of our outer life; and at s-unset our hearts grow 
tenderer to those we hate, and more awake to all the silent 
beauty of existence which our strife, and fret, and follies 
mar and ruin; and — when we love — as the warm sunset 
fades, and the dreamy night draws on, all the poetry and 
passion that lie in us wake from their slumber, and our 
heart throbs with its subtle and voluptuous beauty. 

The golden rays of the sun, while it still lingered over 
the lovely earth, as a lover loth to part, fell upon Alma’s 
golden hair, and lit up her features with a strange radi- 
ance, touching the lips and cheeks into a richer glow, and 
darkening her eyes into a still deeper brilliance. I)e Yigne 
looked down upon her face as it rested against his breast, 
and she gazed up into his dark and brilliant eyes, in which 
a language so new and yet so natural was spoken to her. 
They were silent; they needed no words between them, a 
whisper now and then was all ; their thoughts were better 
uttered by the caresses he lavished upon her, in the vehe- 
mence of his new-born love. The dangerous spell of the 
hour stole upon them; her soft arms were round his neck; 
bis lips rested on her flushed brow ; while one hand played 
with a thick silky lock of her golden hair which had escaped 

VOL. II. 8 2i 


86 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ifom the rest and hung down to her waist, twisting it round 
his fingers and drawing it out, half in admiration of its 
beauty, half in absence of thought; while as the sun sank 
out of sight below the horizon, and the little crescent of 
the moon rose clearer in the evening ether, and the air 
grew sweeter with the more intense perfume of the early 
night, Alma might have known that the heart on which 
her young head rested was throbbing loudly with fiercer 
and more restless passion than the loving and tender joy 
which made her heart its own unclouded heaven. 

And still he had not told her of his marriage : and still 
he said to himself, “I ought to leave her, but, God help 
us I I cannot.''^ 

On their delicious solitude, alone with the beauty of 
nature and of love, the sound of a horse’s hoofs broke, 
with the harsh clang and clamor of the outer world. All 
was so still around Alma’s sequestered home, especially in 
the summer evenings, when the little animal life there was 
about the farm was hushed and at rest, that the unusual 
sound of human life brought, by its sudden inroad, the 
serpent of social life into the solitude of the heart, from 
which for awhile all memory of the prying and fretting 
world had been excluded. 

The horse’s gallop ceased at the little gate, and the 
wicket opened with a clash of its iron latch. De Yigne 
half started, with a vague dread that some one had come 
to try and rob him of his new-won treasure. The strongest 
nerves grow highly strung at times ; when the poetry of life 
wakes in the hearts of men of action, and passion rises up 
out of their ordinarily calm existence, their whole souls stir 
with it, as the great seas that do not move for light showers 
or low winds arise at the sound of the tempest, till all nature 
is awed at their vehemence, and their own lowest depths 
tremble with the convulsion. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


87 


*‘What is the matter?” whispered Alma, as she saw his 
eyes straining eagerly to see who the new-comer was. 

“Nothing, nothing,” he answered, hastily. He could 
not tell her that the vague dread upon him (upon him ! 
he who had laughed at every danger, and held his own 
against every foe) was the terror and the horror of that 
woman whom the Church and Law called his wife. He 
gave a deep sigh of relief as he saw that it was only his 
own groom, Warren, coming up the path with a note in 
his hand ; but his eyebrows contracted, that instantaneous 
sign with him of irritation and annoyance, and the blood 
mounted to his forehead in anger at the interruption. 
With the contradictory waywardness of human nature, 
while he knew that he should never leave Alma unless 
some imperative call aided him to drag himself from her 
,side, he could have found it in his heart to slay the man who 
would force him, however innocently, from his paradise. 

The note was merely from Dunbar, major of Ours, to 
ask to see him at once, on business of urgent military im- 
portance; but as the envelope was marked outside “Im- 
mediate,” rran9ois, his confidential servant, had sent a 
groom off with it as soon as he saw it. 

De Yigne read the note in silence, only pointing to 
Alma the words on it, “Let me see you, if possible, early 
this evening,” and sat still, tearing the paper into little 
pieces, with his teeth set, his face deadly pale, and a bitter 
struggle in his heart — a struggle more hard and cruel, even 
than to most men, to one who had followed all his impulses, 
whose will had been unbridled from his cradle, with whom 
to wish and to have had always been synonymous, and whose 
passions were as strong as renunciation was unaccustomed. 
With a fierce oath muttered in his teeth he sprang to his 
feet ; half awed by the sternness on his face, the gray pallor 
of his cheek, a.nd the flashing fire of his eyes, she took hia 


88 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


handx in her own with the caressing, girlish fondness of lier 
usual manner. 

“ Must you go ? Can’t you give me one-half hour more ? 
That gentleman does not care to see you as I care to keep 
you 1 The hours were always so long when you were 
away; what will they be now? Give me ten minutes 
more — -just ten minutes I You must think of your little 
Alma before everybody now. No one cares for you as 
she does !” 

Her loving, innocent words, the clinging touch of her 
little hands, the witchery of her face, lifted so trustingly 
and frankly up to his in the soft twilight shadows — what 
torture they were to him I 

“Hush, hush I” he said, almost fiercely, crushing her in 
a passionate farewell embrace. “Do not ask me; for 
God’s sake let me go while I can, Alma ! Kiss me and, 
forgive me, my worshiped darling, for all the sins in my 
past, and my acts and my thoughts, of which your guile- 
less heart never dreams I” 

She did not understand him; she had no clew to the 
wild thoughts rioting in his heart; but love taught her 
the sympathy experience alone could not have given; her 
kisses, warm and soft as the touch of rose-leaves, answered 
his prayer, and her words were fond as human words 
could be. 

“Since I love you, how could I help but forgive you 
whatever there might be? No sin that you could tell me 
of would I visit upon you. I do not know what your 
words mean, but I do know how well I love you : too well 
to listen what others might ever say of you ; too well to 
care what your past may have been. There is nothing but 
tenderness and faith between us ; there never can be, there 
never shall be. Good night, my own dearest 1 God bless 
you I” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


S9 


“God bless youl’^ murmured De Yigne, incoherently. 
“Let me go, let me go, Alma, while I have strength 
In another moment the ring of his horse’s hoofs rung 
loud on the stony road, growing fainter and fainter on the 
evening air, till it died away to silence; while Alma leaned 
out under the chestnut-boughs, looking up to the stars that 
were shining in the deep-blue sky, now that the golden 
sunset had faded, with tears of joy on her long black lashes 
and sighs of delight on her warm lips, dreaming her sweet 
love idyll, and thinking of the morrow that would bring 
him to her again. 


PART THE NINETEENTH. 

I. 


A BITTERNESS GREATER THAN DEATH. 

As soon as De Yigne reached town he went home and 
smoked — he needed the sedative badly enough — scarcely 
tasted some soup of all the dainty dinner that awaited 
him, drank plenty of iced hock, and drove to Dunbar’s, 
glad of anything to do that would prevent his needing to 
think. Dunbar, in a very few words, told him what he 
wanted of him, which was to exchange with him back into 
the Dashers, and go out to the Crimea in his stead; but 
in lieu of the eager assent he had anticipated from so 
inveterate a campaigner and thorough-bred a soldier, he 
was astonished to see De Yigne pause, hesitate, and wait 
irresolute. 

“I thought you would like it, old fellow,” said Dunbar. 
“ The exchange would be easily effected. I should be no 
good in the Crimea; the winter season would send me to 

8 * 


90 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


glory in no time with my confounded bronchia, while you 
seemed to enjoy yourself so thoroughly out in India, polish- 
ing off those black devils, that I thought you’d be delighted 
to get a chance of active service again.” 

“I enjoy campaigning; no man more so,” said De Yigne, 
shortly; “and to give up a chance of active service is 
almost as great a sacrifice to me as anything. At the 
same time, circumstances have arisen which make me doubt 
whether I can go in your stead or not. Will you give me 
twenty -four hours to decide?” 

“Very well — if you like. I know you will tell me this 
time to-morrow that you have already ordered your cases 
of Bass, and looked over your new rifles. You will never 
be able to resist the combined seductions of Turkish liaisons 
and Russian spearing,” laughed Dunbar. 

De Yigne laughed too ; though, Heaven knows, laughter 
was far enough from his heart: 

“Yery possibly. Sport has always been my favorite 
Omphale; and it’s one that never makes us pay a price 
for indulging in its amours; we can’t say quite so much 
for the beau sexe I I’ll send you a line to-morrow even- 
ing, yes or no.” 

“Oh! it’s sure to be yes,” said Dunbar. “You were 
always the very deuce for war and women, but I think 
campaigning carried the day.” 

De Yigne laughed again, par complaisance; but he 
thought of one woman he had learnt to love more dearly 
than anything else in earth or heaven. He left Dunbar, 
went back to his house, and shut himself in his own room. 
He lit his cigar, opened the window, and leaned out into 
the sultry July night. His honor and his love were at war, 
and the calm and holy midnight irritated and inflamed, 
wliere at another time it might have soothed him. Never 
in all his life, with its errors, its vehemence, its faults, its 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


91 


hot instincts, its generous impulses, its haughty honor, 
nevei stained by a mean thought, but often hazarded by 
reckless passions, had his nature been so fairly roused as 
now. He knew that he had fallen far from his standard 
of truth and candor in the concealment of his marriage, 
which had gone on from day to day till ho had won the 
deepest love he had ever had, ostensibly a free man ; and 
that knowledge cut him to the soul, and gave him the 
keenest remorse he had ever known; for though he did 
much that was wrong in haste, his conscience was ever 
tender, and nothing could ever blunt him to any derelic- 
tion from frankness and honesty. But he knew, too, now 
that the evil was done, and Alma’s life, as she had told 
him, would be desolate without him, that to leave her 
now would be to quench all the youth and glory from her 
young days, and refuse her the sole consolation in his 
power to give her liis love — no light consolation to a 
woman of her mind and nature. 

He could not have broken from her now ; to have left 
her unprotected, unportioned, friendless, to brave the blasts 
of the world with her high spirit and warm susceptibilities; 
to have bade her farewell for long and weary years, per- 
haps for life itself, never to meet again, never again to 
look into each other’s eyes, and together breathe the free 
fresh air of the fair earth, so fair to those who love; never 
to pass another golden hour together, but to linger through 
all existence apart — apart in all the glorious light of life; 
apart till cold gray age crept on, and both were laid in the 
narrow chamber of the dead ; apart even to the last, the 
lips that had vainly longed for sweet caresses, silent and 
Gxed ; the eyes that had vainly yearned for one sight of the 
loved face, closed and unconscious; the hearts that had 
throbbed with natural human love, stilled and powerless 
forever. To have lived thus apart from life onward into 


92 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


dea.th! He would have had no strength to do it; int 
courage to face so dreary and hopeless a future ; no power 
to condemn her and himself to this gray and weary anguish 
of separation. To break from her now would have been to 
tear his very heart-strings from their core; all his soul 
revolted from the cruel and unnatural divorce, the divorce 
of human hearts created for each other’s joy, formed to 
love and live in that gracious and golden earth which God 
gave to man, and man has marred so sadly for himself and 
for his fellows. 

The Wife the law forced on him his nature, his honor, 
and his heart rejected and forswore; the wife the law 
denied him all alike pointed out and accepted, and to her 
he would have been faithful to the grave. All the man- 
hood in him rebelled against the false and hideous mar- 
riage the world had fastened on him as just and valid ; 
more cruel than the iron shackles on the dying limbs of 
the Neapolitan Pironti, more loathsome than the festering 
sting of the scorpion or the murderous and relentless bite 
of the vampire. The world’s decree had fastened the 
shackles upon him, even though with every link of the 
fetters the iron entered into his soul as when the chains 
were fastened upon the quivering bodies in the Galera 
Politica of our own day. On the world he would revenge 
himself, and if social law had withered half his life social 
opinion should not have power to despoil the rest. 

“God help her,” he muttered to himself, as he looked 
down into the dark and silent street ; “ I will be truer to 
her than any husband ever was to any wife. She is my 
wife by love, by reason, by right, and when others sneer at 
her or pass her coldly by because she has sacrificed herself 
for me, I will atone to her for all — I will give up the world, 
and live for her alone. Since I have crushed my littio 
flower in my headlorg path, I will make up to her by 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


93 


guarding her from all blight or storm. Would to Heaven 
I were worthy of her I” 

Before he slept that night (and his slumber jame not 
without an anodyne) his resolve was made. To-morrow 
he would tell her of his marriage — tell her all. If she 
still loved him, and still wished to live for him, passion- 
ately as his heart was bound to the Service, he would 
throw up his commission and take her to Italy or the 
Ionian Isles, where he would lavish on her all the luxuries 
and pleasures wealth could bring, and give her all he knew 
her heart craved, and what would be all-sulBcient to her 
affectionate and unselfish nature — love. He would live 
for her alone; if, in time, he missed the glare and excite- 
ment of his past life with men, this sacrifice, in return, he 
at the least owed her ; he would not bring her to the dm of 
cities where coarse glances might pain the heart that had 
as yet known no shame, and where coarse judges would 
class her with the base Floras and Leilas of her sex. He 
would give her the life of beauty her vivid imagination 
would paint and thirst for, and for himself — He Vigne, so 
long alone in the world, so long chilled against his nature 
by adverse chances, would have paid down any price to win 
the luxury of love, pure, devoted, single-hearted, unstained 
by a single coarse instinct and unselfish impulse — love such 
as he knew Alma Tressillian bore for him. 

Military duties kept him until late the next day. A 
soldier’s life is not all play, though the foes to a standing 
army are given to making it out so. Several things called 
his attention that morning, and he had afterward to attend 
the first sitting of a court-martial on one of those low 
practical jokes with which raw boys bringing their public 
school vulgarities with them stigmatize a Service that enrolls 
the best gentlemen, the highest courage, and the most 


94 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


finished chivalry of Europe, whose enemies delightedly 
pounce on the exception to uphold it as the rule. 

The court-martial was not over till between two and 
three; De Vigne then hastily got unharnessed and into 
mufti, drank some soda-water — luncheon he very rarely 
took — lighted a cheroot, and threw himself across his 
horse. When he had once determined on a thing he 
never looked back; sometimes it had been better for him 
if he had. Yet, in the long run, I have known more mis- 
chief done by indecision of character than anything else in 
the world, and he is safe to be the strongest and stoutest- 
hearted who never looks back, whether he has determined 
on quitting Sodom or staying in it. The evil lies in hasty 
judgment, not in prompt action. 

Right or wrong, however, he never had looked back, 
and nothing would ever have taught him to do it. His 
mind was made up — if Alma still loved him on hearing all, 
to take her to some southern solitude, and give up his life 
to her; if she reproached and condemned him, to take 
Dunbar’s place, and fight in the Crimea till he fell — and 
nothing would have stirred either of his resolves. In all 
his life he had never turned back from any path where his 
vehement impulse led him ; he was not likely to swerve 
or falter in this, on whose goal his heart was so utterly 
and entirely set, and to which an attachment stronger and 
infinitely deeper than even he had ever known lured him to 
the life for which, in his wild youth, he had not cared, but 
for which irresistible longings had broken up from the hot 
well springs that lay ice-bound, but never dead, under the 
chill stoicism that covered his passionate manhood. He 
rode at a gallop from London to Richmond — rode to the 
fevered thoughts that chased each other through his mind, 
many of them of bitter pain and sharp stinging regret, for 
to the man of honor it was no light trial to say to the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


95 


woman who had trusted him, “I have deceived you!” — 
some of them of an involuntary self-reproach at the 
memory of how little he had merited and fulfilled the trust 
Boughton Tressilliaii had placed in him “as a man wno 
will not misjudge my motives nor wrong ray confidence.” 
Yet all fears were crossed, and all remorse silenced, and 
outweighed by that wild delirium of joy of which his 
nature was capable — that fiery glow and triumph with 
which his great love could not but excel in the love it had 
won back in return, and the happiness she had wrested 
from life which had tried so hard to conquer him, and 
condemn him in the full vigor of youth and manhood to a 
cruel bondage and a chill and joyless solitude — a solitude 
that was not even freedom ! 

All more gloomy memories vanished, as shadows slink 
away before the sultry beauty of the noon, as he came 
witiiin sight of Alma’s home; his pulses glowed with all 
the fire of his earliest boyhood, his heart throbbed quicker, 
as he thought of her fond welcome. He pulled up his 
horse with such abruptness that the beast reared and fell 
back on his haunches; he threw himself off the saddle 
with a headlong impetuosity that might have lost him life 
or limb, flung the bridle over the post, and entered. The 
morning was gray and wet — strange contrast to the radiant 
summer the night before — the birds were silent, the flowers 
were snapped off their stems, their scattered petals lying 
stained and trodden on the moist gravel; his hurried steps 
stamped the discolored rose-leaves into the earth, and the 
dripping chestnut-boughs shook raindrops on him as he 
passed. 

He brushed past the dank bushes in haste, careless, 
indeed unconscious, of the rain that fell upon him, his 
mind and heart full of the bitter history he had to tell, and 
of the love which had stirred every fiber of his warm and 


96 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


deep, though long silent, affections, now fastened on Alma 
with a strength far surpassing the passion, vehement, it is 
true, but wayward and fickle, with which other women had 
inspired him. With all the impatience of his nature he 
glanced up at the house as he approached. He expected 
to find her looking out for him,^o see her eyes fixed wist- 
fully upon the gate, and to watch the radiance of joy dawn 
upon her face as she beheld him. He wanted to see that 
her thoughts and moments were consecrated to him in his 
absence as well as his presence, and to have in her joyous 
welcome and her rapid bound to meet him, surer evidence 
still of her love. He had no doubt of her; he knew that 
Alma was too fond to weigh the world against him, to 
balance love with prudence, and cloak egotism in the guise 
of affronted virtue. He had no fear but that she would 
link her life to his in the union for which nature pleaded, 
and which was their manhood’s and their womanhood’s 
right. Still, not to see her there struck a deadly chill into 
his heart; it was his first disappointment in her — a disap- 
pointment that was almost a prophecy. 

With a strange, disproportionate anxiety he brushea 
past the dripping chestnut-boughs, ran up the steps of her 
bay-window, pushed open the glass door, and entered. 
There were her easel, her flowers, her little terrier, Pauline 
upon her stand pluming her feathers and congratulating 
herself on her own beauty, one of his own books, “Notre 
Dame,” open on her low chair, with some moss-roses flung 
down in a hurry on its leaves; her colors, and brushes, and 
half-finished sketches scattered over the room — but the 
little mistress and queen of it all was absent. There waa 
no sweet welcome for him, no loving, radiant face uplifted 
to his, no rapid musical voice to whisper ^ his ear earnest, 
impassioned words, no soft caresses to linger on his lips, no 
warm young heart to beat against his owq. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


97 


lie glanced hastily round on the still deserted chamber, 
then opened the door, and called her by her name. The 
house was low and not large, and he knew she would come 
at the sound of his voice as a spaniel at its master’s call. 
There was no reply ; the building was silent as death, and 
his heart beat thickly with a vague and startled dread. He 
went on the staircase and repeated her name; still there 
was no reply. Had she been anywhere in the house, small 
as it was, he knew she would have heard and answered 
him. A horrible unexplained fear fastened upon him, and 
he turned into a small old-fashioned bed-chamber, the door 
of which stood open, for in its farther window he caught 
sight of the old woman, her nurse, alone, but sitting in her 
wicker-chair, her head covered with her apron, rocking 
herself to and fro in the silent and querulous grief of 
age. 

It is no metaphor that his heart stood still as he beheld 
her grief, which, mute as it was, spoke to him in a hundred 
hideous suggestions. She started up as his step rang on 
the bare floor, and wrung her hands, the tears falling down 
her wrinkled cheeks. 

“Oh, sir! oh, sir! my poor young lady — my pretty dar- 
ling ” 

His hand clinched on her arm like an iron vice. 

“My God I what has happened ?” 

“That ever I should live to see the day,” moaned the 
old woman. “That ever I couldn’t have died afor( it. 
My pretty dear — my sweet little lady that I nursed on my 
knee when she was a little laughing ” 

His grasp crushed on to her wrist, while his words 
broke from him inarticulate and broken in his dire 
agony. # 

“Answer me — what is it? Where is she? Speak — do 
you hear?” 

VOL. II 


9 


98 


GRANVILLE DE V'IGNE. 


The woman heard him, and waved to and fro in the 
garrulous grief of her years. 

“Yes, sir — yes; but I am half crazed. She’s gone — my 
poor dear darling !” 

“ Gone — dead P’ 

The hue of death itself spread over his face. He let go 
his hold upon her arm and staggered backward, all life 
seeming to cease in the mortal terror of suspense and 
dread. 

“No, sir — no, thank Heaven!” murmured the woman, 
blind to the agony before her in her own half-fretful 
sorrow. “Not dead, the pretty dear, though some, I 
dare say, would sooner see her in her coffin, and sure she 
might be happier in her grave, than she’ll be now, poor 
child I” 

The blood rushed back to his brain and heart; his 
strong nerves trembled, and he shook in every limb in the 
anguished agitation of that brief moment which seemed 
to him a ceaseless eternity of torture. If not dead she 
Eould not be lost to him; no human hand had powei to 
take her from his arms. 

All his fiery passion, which never brooked opposition or 
delay, awoke again. He seized the garrulous woman in a 
grasp whose fervency terrified her : 

“Where is she, then ? Speak — in a word — without that 
senseless babble.” 

“Yes, sir, yes,” sobbed the old nurse, half lost in her 
quavering sorrow, but terrified at his manner and his tone. 
“ She’s gone away, sir, with that soft, lying, purring villain 
— oh. Lord I oh, Lord I what is his name ? — that false, silky, 
girl-faced lord — a duke’s son they said he was — who was 
always hankering after her, and coming to buy pictures, 
and cared no more for pictures than that cat. She’s gone 
off with him, sir — that dear, innocent child, that a bad man 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


99 


could trap into anything. Thank God ! her poor grand- 
father died before it; it would have broke his heart almost: 
his pretty darling, that he’d have thought too good for a 
king on his throne. And it’s all my fault. I should have 
told her what bad men will be — but she was always such a 
proud little lady, I never thought of saying a word to her, 
or daring to tell her what she oughtn’t to do. And now 
she’s gone away with him, the lying, silky villain, and he’ll 
no more marry her than he’ll marry me ; and he’ll leave her 
to starve in some foreign land, most likely, and I shall never 
see her little bright face again. Oh, Lord ! oh, Lord I sir, 
you men have much to answer for ” 

“ She is gone I — with him I” 

If she had not been so wrapped in her own rambling 
regrets she must have noticed the terrible, unutterable 
anguish in his hoarse and broken words as he grasped her 
arm with almost wild, unconscious ferocity of madness: 

“Woman, it is a vile plot — a lie. She has been trapped, 
deceived. She has not gone of her own will !” 

“Yes, sir, she is — she’s gone of her own mind, her own 
choice,” moaned the old nurse. 

“I tell you she did not — it is a lie,” swore De Vigne. 
“He has stolen her, tricked her, fooled her away. It is a 
lie, I tell you, and you have been bribed to forge it. He 
has decoyed her away, and employed you for his accom- 
plice, to pass this varnished'tale on me. My God ! if you 
do not acknowledge the truth I will find a way to make 
you !” 

Terrified at his violence the old woman shook with fear, 
tears falling down her pale and withered cheeks : 

“I tell you truth, sir — before Heaven I do. Do you 
think I should injure her, my pretty little lady, that I’ve 
loved like my own child ever since my poor master brought 
her from foreigu lands, a little lisping, gold-haired thing? 


lOO 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


Do you think I should join in a plot against her, when I’ve 
loved her all her life? Don’t you think, sir, I’d be the first 
to screen her and the last to blame her ? I tell you truth, 
sir, and it breaks ray heart in the telling. She went of her 
own free will, and nothing could stop her. She must have 
planned it all with him yesterday when he was here; the 
oily, cruel villain ! I knew he didn’t come after them pic- 
tures; but I never thought Miss Alma would have come 
to this. She w^ent of her own will, sir — she did, indeed I 
Lord Vane’s carriage — his broom, I think they call it — 
came here between twelve and one this morning; not him 
in it, but his valet, and he asked straight for Miss Tressil- 
lian, and said he had a message for her, and went in to give 
it. I thought nothing of it — so many people have been 
coming and going lately for the pictures; and indeed, sir, 
I thought he was your servant, for the man looked like 
one you used to send here, till my boy, Tom, come in, and 
said he’d asked the coachman, and the coachman told him 
his master was the Duke of Tiara’s son, and lived in the 
Albany, I think he called it, whatever that may be. The 
man wasn’t there long before I heard Miss Alma run up 
stairs, and as I went across the passage I see her coming 
down them, with her little black hat on, and a cloak over 
her muslin dress; and a queer dread come over me, as it 

w^ere, for I see her face was flushed, and she’d tears in her 
✓ 

eyes, and a wild, excited look; and I asked her where she 
was going. But she didn’t seem to hear me; and she 
brushed past me to where the man was standing. ‘I am 
ready,’ she says to him, very excited like; and then 1 
caught hold of her — I couldn’t help it, sir — and I said, 
though I didn’t know^ where or why she was going, ‘Don’t 
go. Miss Alma — don’t go, my darling.’ But she turned 
her face to me, with her sweet smile — you know her pretiy, 
imperious, impatient ways — ‘ I must, nurse !’ and I got hold 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


lOi 


of her, and kept on saying, ‘Don’t go, Miss Alma! don’t! 
— tell me where you’re going, at least — do I — ray dear little 
lady 1’ But you know, sir, if she’s set her heart on a thing, 
it ain’t never easy to set her against it; and there was tears 
in her eyes. She broke away with that willfulness she’s 
had ever since she was a little child : ‘ I cannot stop, nurse 
— let me go I’ and she broke« away, as I said, and went 
down the garden path, sir, the man following after her. 
and she entered Lord Vane’s carriage, and he got up in 
front, and they drove away, sir, down the road ; and that’s 
the last I ever see of my poor master’s darling. Heaven 
bless her ! and she’ll be led into sorrow, and ruin, and 
shame, and she’ll think it’s all for love, poor child; and 
he’ll break her heart and her high proud spirit, and then 
he’ll leave her to beg for her bread; for that bird’s better 
notions of work than she ; and a deal fit she is to cope 
with the world, that’s so cold and cruel to them that go 
against it I” * * * * * * * 

But long ere she ceased her garrulous grief, heedless of 
his presence or his absence in her absorbed sorrow for her 
lost darling, De Yigne had staggered from the chamber, 
literally blinded and stunned by the blow he had received 
A sick and deadly faintness as after a vital wound stole 
over him, every shadow of color faded from his face as on 
his marriage-day, leaving it a gray and ashy hue even to 
liis very lips; his brain was dizzy with a fiery weight that 
seemed to i)ress u})on it; he felt liis way, as if it were dark, 
into an adjoining room, and sank down upon its single 
sofa, all tlie strength of his vigorous manhood broken and 
cast down by liis great agony. How great that agony 
was Heaven only knew. 

He threw back, as a hideous nightmare, the thought 
that Alma could be false to him; that a girl so young, so 
frank, so fond, could be so arch an actress ; that all those 

9* 2 k 


102 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


loving wolds, those sweet caresses, that earnest and im- 
passioned aflfection lavished on him but a few short hours 
before, were all a lie. Yet the curse of evidence chimed 
strangely in ; he recalled her blush at his mention of Castle- 
ton’s name; he remembered that his ex-valet, Raymond, 
had entered Castleton’s service on being discharged from 
bis; the mere circumstance of her having left with any 
one, for anywhere, without an explanation, a word, or a 
message to him — her lover, whom she had parted with so 
passionately the night before — these alone wrote out her 
condemnation, and shattered all hope before his eyes. 

What it was to him with all his fiery passions, and deep, 
silent heart, so fixed and centered on this girl, to find her 
false, to lose the strongest love of all his life, to know the 
woman he coveted with the ardent avarice of jealous wor- 
ship won by another, the joys he thirsted for given to a 
rival he hated with all the bitter hate of a man for the 
spoiler who has robbed him of his single treasure — human 
words, so weak even at the strongest to picture human 
woe, could never tell. He had had fierce wrongs, fiery 
hate, and deep, silent sorrows in his life, but none had been 
like this : the death-blow to all there was of youth, of faith, 
of beauty, and of glory in his life. Sudden and passionate 
as had been his dream of love was his terrible awakening. 
Every nerve seemed to ache with the dull and dreary an- 
guish, every vein seemed on fire with the fell torture of 
jealousy, his brain grew dizzy trying to realize the hideous 
and incredible truth, he sat like a man paralyzed with a 
violent and vital blow. He had come full of such a radiant 
and impassioned future, and an agony worse than his wild- 
est imaginations could have ever dreaded had met him on 
the threshold. 

He sat there in as mortal anguish as man ever knew 
If wrong there had been in his acts and his thoughts it 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


103 


was fearfully and cruelly avenged, and the punishment far 
outweighed the sin. Across the midnight darkness of his 
mind gleamed lightning flashes of fiery thoughts. Once 
he started to his feet — in the delirium of jealousy he swore 
to find Castleton wherever he had hid, and make him yield 
her up, or fight for her till one or the other fell. But pride 
was not all dead in him — nor ever would be while he had 
life. Since she had gone to another, let another keep her I 

He sat there, all hue of life blanched from his face, his 
hands clinched, his teeth set tightly as in lock-jaw; the 
very suddenness of the blow had struck him with some- 
thing of the blind, dizzy unconsciousness of physical and 
mortal pain. Once he arose, and sought half unconsciously, 
and with something of the dreamy instinct of a man para- 
lyzed by a blow struck at him in the dark, for some note, 
some sign, some token that might explain her flight, or 
show at least that she had remembered him whom she had 
betrayed. He found none, and he sank back on the little 
couch with a moan of weary anguish, and a bitter curse on 
the sex that had twice betrayed him. 

And now it was that the great faults of De Yigne’s 
nature — hasty doubt, and passionate judgment — came out 
and rose up against him, marring his life once more. 
That quick skepticism which one betrayal had engrafted 
on a nature naturally trusting and unsuspicious, never per- 
mitted him to pause, to weigh, to reflect; with the rapidity 
of vehement and jealous passion, from devoted faith in the 
woman he loved, he turned to hideous disbelief in her, and 
classed her recklessly and madly with the vilest and the 
falsest of her sex. Of no avail the thousand memories 
of Alma’s childlike purity and truth which one moment’s 
thought would have summoned up in her defense, of no 
avail the fond and noble words spoken to him but the 
day before, which one moment’s recollection would have 


i04 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


brought to his mind to vouch for her innocence, and set 
before him in its vile treachery the plot to which she had 
fallen victim, — of no avail ! Passionate in every impulse, 
hasty in every judgment, too cruelly stung to remember in 
his madness any reason or any justice, he seized the very 
poison that was his death-draught, and grasped a lie as 
truth. 

How long he sat there he never knew ; time was a long 
blank to him ; roll on as it might, it could only serve him 
in so far as it brought him nearer to his grave. His brain 
was on fire, his thoughts lost in one sharp, stinging agony 
that had entered into his life never to quit it. Thought, 
memory, hope, were all merged in one fierce, unutterable 
anguish, where hate, and love, and a very delirium of 
jealousy seemed to goad him on to madness. He sat there, 
that one dread fiery weight upon him like molten iron 
pressing on his brain, till her little dog, that had followed 
him up the stairs, and now crouched near him, awed as 
animals always are at the sight of human suffering, crept 
up and licked his hand, uttering a long, low whine as if 
mourning for her lost to them both. The touch roused 
him ; how often in happier days, before the curse of love 
rose up between them, had he smiled to see her playing 
like a child with her little terrier I The touch roused him, 
calling him back to the life charged with such unutterable 
woe for him. He lifted his head and looked around ; the 
clouds had rolled away, and the evening sun, bursting out 
in all its glory, shone with cruel mockery into the little 
chamber which, as it chanced, was Alma’s apartment. The 
latth'.e windows were open, and the roses and clematis 
looked in with their bright eyes, while the summer wind 
swept over them with a fresh glad fragrance, stirring the 
open leaves of a book that lay where she had left it on the 
dressing-table, and stirring the muslin curtains of the little 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


105 


white bed where night after night her radiant blue eyes had 
closed in sleep, as pure and sweet as a harebell folding 
itself to slumber. As he lifted his eyes and looked around 
the little chamber, so fell his glance upon his own portrait, 
which hung against the wall with the sunlight streaming 
full upon it — the portrait which she had drawn from 
childish memory of her friend “Sir Folko.” The sight of 
the picture told him that it was her room into which he 
had staggered in his unconscious sulfering, and recalled to 
him the early days when she had first shown him that por- 
trait, lavishing on him her innocent gratitude, her playful 
tenderness; the early days when their intercourse had been 
shadowless, and the curse of love had not entered their 
lives and risen up between them. As he gazed around 
him at all the trifles that spoke to him like living things of 
the woman he had loved and lost, the bitter agony in his 
soul seemed greater than he could bear ; the fierce tension 
of his strained nerves gave way ; with one cry to Heaven 
in his mortal anguish, he fell like a drunken man across 
the little couch, his brow resting on the pillow where her 
golden head had so often lain in childlike sleep, deep sobs 
heaving his breast, burning tears forcing themselves from 
his eyes, tears which seemed to wring his very life-blood 
from him in their fiery rain, yet tears which saved him in 
that horrible hour from madness. 

That night he wrote thus briefly to the Major: 

“Dear Dunbar, — I desire to exchange with you if it 
ran be effected. There is no time to be lost. 

“Yours sincerely, 

“Granville De Yigne.’^ 


106 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


II. 


HOW WE RODE IN THE LIGHT CAVALRY CHARGE. 

Aladyn and Devno I — those green stretching meadows, 
those rich dense forests, catching the golden glow of the 
sunshine of the East — those sloping hill-sides, with the 
clematis, and acacia, and wild vine clinging to them, and 
the laughing waters of lake and stream sleeping at their 
base — who could believe that horrible pestilential vapors 
stole up from them, like a murderer in the dark, and breath- 
ing fever, ague, and dysentery into the tents of a slumber- 
ing army, stabbed the sleepers while they lay, unconscious 
of the assassin’s hand that was draining away their life 
and strength? Yet at the very names of Aladyn and 
Devno rise to memory days of futile longing and weary 
inaction, of negligence inconceivable and ennui unuttera- 
ole, of life spent for the lack of simplest common sense, 
and graves filled by a school-boy greed for fruit — such fruit 
as in such a land was poison when backed by a mad 
draught of raki. Days when, forbidden to seek another 
foe, Englishmen and Frenchmen went down powerless and 
spiritless before the cholera, which had its deadly grip 
upon them ere they heard its stealthy step. Days, when 
you could not stroll on the beach without finding at your 
feet a corpse hastily thrust into the loosened sand, for dogs 
to gnaw and vultures to make their meal, or look across 
the harbor without seeing some dead body floating, upright 
and horrible, in the face of the summer sun. Days, when 
pestilence was abroad through the encampment from Mo- 
nastir to Yarna, and the stately Guards, the flower of Eng- 
and, the men fresh from the easy, lounging life of London 
nd Windsor, these soldiers “qui marchent comme les 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


107 


Dieux,” were so worn out by exhaustion, disease, and the 
deadly Bulgarian air, that they had barely strength left to 
inarch from Aladyn to Yarna. Not the place for men to 
dwindle away their days who had a campaign, and a tough 
siege, and a bitter winter before them ; still less the place 
for men to come to whose hearts were broken, and whose 
lives were dark and hopeless. Action and excitement are 
opiates and panaceas to the deadliest sorrow; inaction eats 
into the gayest heart, and depresses the lightest spirits, and 
men who will bear to die in the greatest torture without a 
murmur or a tremor in their voice, will sicken, and pine, 
and grow depressed and dispirited, when waiting and 
waiting, as the English and French forces waited on the 
pestilential shores of Bulgaria. 

Yet we went out to the Crimea light-heartedly and 
cheerfully enough, God knows. We, tired of our easy life 
at home, lounging in clubs, pacing in the Ring, and flirting 
in Belgravian salons, were glad of a chance of that real 
campaigning of which almost all of us were ignorant, 
knowing no heavier fatigue than a Hyde Park field-day or 
a Woolwich sham fight; and the men took it calmly and 
cheerily, from the gravest lance-corporal to the youngest 
lad who captivated maid-servants with his dainty stable- 
dress. Ours were as fine a set of fellows as England ever 
sent away from her barracks, and though people tell us 
that our Service is apt to make much of small grievances, 
(an accusation I think they can hardly make against us 
when great ones fall in to our share,) the men bore the dis- 
comforts of shipboard, cramped and cooped up, pitching 
and tossing over the Bay of Biscay, with nothing to do 
but to puff at their pipes, and look at the seagulls, and 
suffer the miseries of the mal de mer with as much pluck 
and patience as could be expected from any Britons. 

Women wept sorely the day our transport got under 


108 


GRANVILLE I)E VIGNE. 


weigh; they would have wept more bitterly still if they 
had foreseen the pestilence of Bulgaria, the shelterless 
landing of the 14 th of September, the heaps of gay uni- 
forms and stiffening corpses thrust pele-mele into a hastily 
dug pit; the long nights in the trenches, where men fell 
and none marked their fall ; the winter days, when, more 
miserable than the poorest beggar crouching in a gutter 
at home, Englishmen were bidden to fight, but only left 
to endure, and not a soul in England seemed to care 
whether they lived or died. 

We went out to the Crimea delightedly enough ; most 
of us had a sort of indistinct panorama of skirmishes and 
excitement, of breathless charges and handsome Turkish 
women, of dangers, difficulties, and good tough struggles, 
pleasant as sport but higher spiced ; of a dashing, brilliant 
campaign, where we should taste real life and give hard 
hits, and win perhaps some honor, and where we should 
say, “ Si I’on meurt, eh bien, tant pis I’’ in the gay words 
of the merry French bivouac-song. We thought of what 
our governors or grandsires had done in the Peninsula, 
and longed to do the same — we did not guess that as dif- 
ferent as the bundles of linen, with wrinkled, hideous feat- 
ures, that the Tartars called women, were to the lovely 
prisoners from the convents of flaming Badajoz, would be 
the weary, dreary, protracted waiting while the batteries 
strove to beat in the walls of Sebastopol, to the brilliant 
and rapid assault by which Ciudad Rodrigo was won I I 
do not like to write of the Crimea ; so many painful mem- 
ories come up with its very name — memories such as all 
who were out there must have by the score ; of true friends 
slaughtered by negligence and lack of knowledge ; of noble 
fellows lost through the red-tapeism of regulation, that 
kept its bales of drugs miles away from those that wanted 
them, and would not give up necessaries to save the soldiers 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. lOS 

from (lying off one after another, like bees in a smoked hive, 
without “an order.” Of the army that landed in Oalipoli, 
how many in six months’ time had fallen in the field, and 
how many had died of cholera, of dysentery, of pestilence, 
caught among the deadly forests of Bulgaria, or brought 
on by the exposure of the night of their first bivouac; of 
cold, and fevers, and agues, from that piercing wind from 
which they were given no protection ; from that deadly 
frost, before which mules, and horses, and men went down, 
while the soldiers in the trenches were dropping off for 
simple lack of any clothing warmer than rags an English 
pauper would reject, and the Household Troops wei;jB shoe- 
less in the snow ! A devil within me always rises up when 
I think of it — of the white gravestones on Cathcart’s Hill, 
and the rough burial-places of those whom sickness and 
privation slew when they had come untouched from under 
the very batteries of the enemy; of Lacy Yea’s face, as it 
lay swollen and almost undistinguishable oh the slopes of 
the Bedan; of Louis Nolan'’s last shriek; of our men, 
with the bones of their frost-bitten hands laid bare; of the 
soldiers, who would have fought to the last gasp with de- 
light, yet were forced to be, as they termed it, with the 
iron in their souls, — “yjoor, broken-down, old commis- 
sariat mules of the young boys, delicately nurtured, 
and fresh from every luxury and comfort in their homes, 
where to wish was to have, and life was one bright sum- 
mer day, toiling along in the blinding snow that cavalry 
horses refused to face, with their clothes hanging about 
tliem in miserable tatters, helping their men to tramp the 
weary five miles between the camp and the commissariat 
stores, with a cask of rum or biscuit; bearing negligence, 
privation, storm, and misery, animatedly, cheerily, laugh- 
ing and comforting their men, even while their own young 
lives were slowly ebbing away with a sickness unto death ; 

lu 


VOL. II. 


110 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


. — when I think of all I saw and heard, of all I know wag 
done and suffered there, a devil rises in me that nothing 
can exorcise. Nothing personal prompts my anger; I 
liked the campaign well enough myself, having one of the 
very few tents that stood the hurricane, not missing more 
than nine-tenths of my letters, enjoying the exceptional 
blessing of something like a warm coat, and being now 
and then the happy recipient of a turkey, or some coffee 
that was not ground beans. 

I was rewarded as much as any man could expect to be. 
I have a medal (shared in common with Baltic sailors who 
never ^aw the foe, save when securely anchored off Cron- 
stadt) and three clasps, like the privates of the Line, 
though I am not aware that any infantry man was present 
at the Balaklava charge. When I came home I was re- 
ceived in a highly enthusiastic manner by the tenantry at 
Longholme, who, having an eye to the non-raising of their 
rents, would have cheered the son of the lord of their 
manor till their throats were hoarse, though he had been 
as great a brute as the Muscovites who bayoneted our 
wounded on the field. No; I am perfectly content myself, 
being happily able to buy my own majority, and being, 
therefore, independent of that very precarious thing “pro- 
motion for distinguished services.” But when I think ot 
them all — my dead friends, men so gallant-hearted, men 
of such high mettle and courage, who went out so cheerily 
to danger, and wooed death as others woo their brides, 
and bore with ev^ry privation, only thinking of their “poor 
men,” whose deprivations cut nearer to them than their 
own, and who laid down their lives cheerfully and unre- 
iniugly, though to many of them life was very sweet and 
very pixsoiouisk dying of thirst and gunshot wounds on the 
dark battle-htid, or of typhus fever or cholera among the 
dreary and crowded hospitals, — when I think of them all, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Ill 


whose bodies lie thick where "the sweet wild lavender is 
blowing over the barren steppes of the Chersonese tnis 
summer’s day, I remember, wrathfully, how civilians, by 
their own warm hearths, sat and dictated measures by 
which whole regiments starving with cold, sickened and 
died ; and how ludian officers, used to the luxurious style 
of Eastern warfare and travel, asserted those privations to 
be '‘nothing,” which they were not called to bear; and I 
f(;ar — I fear — that England may one day live to want such 
sons of hers as she let suffer and rot on the barren plains 
of the Crimea, in such misery as she would shudder to 
entail on a pauper or a convict. 

What a night that was the British array spent on Sep- 
tember 14 I Few of us will ever forget our first bivouac 
on the Chersonese soil. That pitiless drenching down- 
pour of sheets of ink-black water, soaking through and 
through every blanket or great-coat that we, without a 
tent over any one of our heads in that furious storm, could 
offer to oppose to its violence — what a night it was! his 
first taste of campaigning was rough enough to many a 
poor fellow. Old generals accustomed to easy fauteuils, 
pleasant mornings in club-windows, slow canters on park- 
hacks, and lengthened dinners, products of a cordon bleu, 
were glad of the shelter of a bit of water-proof wrapper, 
and envying the Duke and Sk George Brown their tilted 
cart. Young lords and ho^orables, with the down hardly 
on their cheeks, fr^sh frora'every luxury and pleasure, ac- 
customed to get up at noon after their chocolate and French 
novel, to be dressed by their valet with finest linen and most 
delicious bouquet; were lying down with reeking pools for 
their beds, in the^pelting, ceaseless storm of rain that poured 
all night on their defenseless heads from the inhospitable 
clouds of the Crimea. What a night it was I De Vigno, 
ever reckless of weather, had not even a blanket to wrap 


112 


GRANVILLE PE VTGNE. 


round him, and lay there in the puddles of which the 
morass-like earth was full, the rain pouring down upon 
him, the sole man in that army of twenty thousand odd 
who did not vent his discomfort in groans or oaths; per- 
haps there was so great a tempest warring in his heart 
that all exterior miseries passed unnoticed. And Sabre- 
tasche, the refined, luxurious man of fashion, accustomed 
to an excess of luxury even in an age when luxury is at its 
height, who loved to surround himself with every delicacy 
and every pleasure that could lull the senses and shut out 
the harsher world, on whose ear, and eyes, and taste any- 
thing bizarre, painful, or unsightly jarred so unspeakably, 
and who had been used from his birth to the most volup- 
tuous and raflfine life, passed the night in a storm to which 
we should not expose a dog, and in discomfort for which 
we should pity a beggar; yet gave away the only shelter 
he had, a Highland plaid, to a young boy who had but 
lately joined, a little fellow with a face as fair as a girl’s, 
and who had barely seen seventeen summers, who was 
shivering and shuddering with incipient ague. 

The stamp of their bitter fate was upon both those Inen ; 
the wounds were too deadly and too recent to be yet 
skinned over; healed they deemed they never would be, 
while their hearts beat and pulses throbbed. How Violet 
and Sabretasche parted Heaven only knew ; no human 
eyes had pried in upon them in that darkest hour; they 
had parted on the very day that should have been their 
marriage-day; and of all the bitter farewells that were 
spoken that year, when so many of the best beloved of 
women left England — left, never to behold it or them again 
. — none was like unto theirs, when their lips met in kisses 
such as the living give the dead ere the tomb shuts them 
forever from their sight. They had parted — whether ever 
to meet again on earth who could tell ? They had parted 


GRANVILLE D£ VIGNE. 


113 


— the lives that should have blent in one were torn asunder 
He left her, and came among us — calm, gentle, kind to 
those about him — thoughtful of the comforts and the needs 
of his men and his horses ; but his brilliant and subtle wit 
was silent ; the melancholy which had tinged his character, 
even in his happiest hours, had closed wearily and hope- 
lessly around him. His trial was known to all; even the 
men who had admired Violet’s fair face when she had 
driven up to the barracks, or come to a luncheon in the 
mess-room, had caught some version and some glimmering 
of it, and there was not one among the Dashers who did 
not, in his own way, grieve for and reverence the Colonel’s 
sorrow, for not Strangways, nor Yea, nor Eman, nor Trow- 
bridge, were ever better loved by their men than Vivian 
Sabretasche was by his. 

De Vigne was even yet more altered, and I, who knew 
nothing of the cause, saw with astonishment all the icy 
coldness and the chilling hardness which had grown on 
him after his fatal marriage, but which had of late been 
utterly dissipated, now closing round him again in tenfold 
gloom and impenetrability, i could but guess at the cause, 
when, before the embarkation, I, knowing nothing of his 
passion for Alma, had asked him if he had been to bid her 
good-by, and wondered what the poor little thing would 
do without her beloved Sir Folko ; — he turned on to me, 
his face white as death, his eyes black as night: 

“Never breathe that name to me again !” 

I knew him too well to press questions upon him, and 
unspeakably as I wondered at this abrupt snap of a friend- 
ship which I had always thought would lead to something 
dearer between a man of his age and a girl of hers, I was 
obliged CO be content with ray suspicions as to the solu- 
tion, in which I did not much doubt the passion that De 
Vigne had so contemptuously defied had been at work. 

10 * 


I 


114 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


r»ut, Vnowing him as I did, I was pained to see the bitter 
gloom which had gathered round him again, too deeply 
for trouble, danger, excitement, or care of comment, to 
have any power to dissipate it; the fierce and stormy 
passions chained and pent up within him could not but 
have effect upon his outward manner. He had an im- 
patient, irritable hauteur to his men quite foreign to him, 
for to his soldiers he was invariably generous and con- 
siderate ; he was much more stern in his military orders, 
for before he had abhorred anything like martinetism ; and 
there was a settled and iron gloom upon him with which 
every now and then it seemed as if the fiery nature in him 
were at war, struggling like the flames of a volcano within 
its prison of ice. From the time he took Dunbar’s place 
as major of Ours, I never saw him smile, not once, that 
sunny, sweet, and radiant smile which used to light up his 
face so strangely, however haughty or grave the moment 
before. I never saw him smile, but I did see him now and 
then, when he was sitting smoking in the door of his tent, 
or riding beside me home from a dog-hunt or a hurdle- 
race, look across to where the sea lay, with a passionate 
agony in his eyes, which must have poured out its pent-up 
suffering in a resistless tide under the shadow of night and 
solitude. All he seemed to live for was headlong and reck- 
less danger, if he could have had it. The thing that 
roused him the most since we left England was when St. 
Arnaud, Bosquet, Forey, and their stall* rode along the 
front of our columns before Alma, and we were told what 
the Marshal said to the 55th; “English, I hope you will 
fight well to-day.” 

“By Heaven !” swore De Yigne, fiercely, ‘ if I had been 
near that fellow I would have told him we will fight as we 
fought at Waterloo I” 

It was a bitter trial to him, as to us all, that the Cavalry 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


115 


eould not do more on the 20th, when we sat in onr saddles, 
seeing the serried columns of the Line dash througn the 
hissing waters, red with blood and foaming with the storm 
of shot, and force their way through the vineyards of the 
Alma — that little tortuous stream where we tasted blood 
for the first time on Crimean soil, whose name, with all his 
self-command, made De Yigne wince more than a Cossack 
lance thrust through his side would have done. We had 
not enough to do to satisfy any one of us. Sabretasche 
had longed to lead the men, in whose efficiency to do any- 
thing he was almost as firm a believer as poor Nolan, on 
to some such brilliant charge as Anglesea’s, when his mag- 
nificent rush of Royals, Grays, and Enniskilleners captured 
the eagles of D’Erlon’s brigade; and De Yigne envied, 
with all the appreciation and admiring envy of a beau 
sabreur who knew what good fighting really was, the in- 
dividual hair-breadth escape of the Guards, the rush of the 
Fusiliers, the way that Sir Colin’s Highlanders won their 
bonnets. To have sit like targets for the Russians’ round 
shots, though our men were as immovable as if that storm 
of balls that tore through our lines and ripped up our 
horses had been soft summer rain, was much too quiet 
business for any of us. When we awoke on the morning 
of the 23d to march on to Katcha, awoke in the dull, 
dusky fog, through which the watch-fires struggled with 
the heavy damp and dew, and the rich thrilling roll of tlio 
French horns and drums and trumpets, all blending in ono 
wild flourish, came rolling its stirring music through the 
valley of the Alma, De Yigne looked back to the plain, 
where nigh eight hundred men lay wounded and helpless, 
with only one English surgeon — Thompson of the 44th — 
left with them to care for their great needs, and as he 
looked wished, I believe, that the stinging, throbbing 
agony of his life had been stilled there once forever, and 


116 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


that lie could have fallen in the stead of little Walsham of 
the Artillery, or Monck of the 7th, or any other of the 
many shoveled into those yawning pits hastily dug on the 
hill-side for the dead that had fallen among the vineyards 
of Alma. 

Heaven forbid that I should intrude a history of the 
Crimean campaign upon you. Most of you have some- 
body either beside you, or in your family, or on your 
visiting list, who will tell you better than I can write — 
since each man sees things through his own lorgnon, and 
there never was a battle yet fought, nor even the most in- 
significant skirmish, of which each individual present had 
not his own particular account, differing in pretty well 
everything from his comrades — of all we did and all we did 
not do. Besides, the Crimea is getting rococo now, and it 
is the fashion to look at it as a dim era of the past, and the 
blood spilt and the bodies strewn so thick upon its barren 
steppes have been superseded in interest by the ‘‘great 
national movement” of those civilians who are just now 
frantically leaving briefs and banks, offices and chambers 
and consultation-rooms, to shoot at butts, and show them 
selves in the streets, after the eccentric manner of all ama- 
teurs, in the glory of their full sleeves, Albert hats, and 
waving cocktails. Heaven forbid that I should bore you 
with a history of the Crimea. We would fain have done 
much more there if they had let us, and what we did do we 
do not need to din into anybody, since it was our simplest 
and our plainest duty. 

We were weary of inaction; our Arm of the service had 
had little or nothing to do; we were not allowed to push 
on the pursuit at Alma, nor the charge at Mackenzie’s 
Farm; we were stung by certain individual sneers that- we 
were “too fine gentlemen for our work,” and we were 
longing to prove, as we should have done long before if 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

opportunity had not been denied us, that if we were 
“aOove our business of collecting supplies for the army,” 
we could, if we had the chance, send home to England 
Buch a talc as would show them how cheaply the fine gen- 
tlemen of the Light Cavalry held life when honor claimed 
it; and would cover our slanderers forever in the shame of 
their own lies. Whether it was from necessity or from in- 
justice, opinions differed, but we felt that our Arm had not 
had the opportunities given us we might have had, and 
De Yigne was not alone in the bitter oaths he swore at the 
enforced inaction of the Light Cavalry, when we might 
have shown them what we could do, had we only been al- 
lowed, both at, and subsequent to, Alma. He was not 
alone in the glow of excitement and the hope of “some- 
thing to do,” when, at half-past seven, the news of the 
Kussians’ advance came down to our camp on the dawn of 
the 25th of October, and without time for the men to water 
the horses, or get any breakfast for themselves, we were 
roused by the notes of Boot and Saddle, and drawn up on 
the slopes behind the redoubts. The story of that day is 
well enough known in England. How brightly the sun 
shone that morning, dancing on the blue strip of sea, and 
flashing on the lines of steel gleaming and bristling below; 
on the solid masses of the Russians, with their glittering 
lances and sabers, and their gay accoutered skirmishers 
v/hirling before their line of march like swallows in the air; 
on the fierce-eyed, rapid, brilliant Zouaves lying behind the 
earthworks ; on our Light and Heavy brigades in front of 
our camp ; on Sir Colin’s Highlanders drawn up two deep; 
— the 93d did not need to alter their line even to receive 
the magnificent charge of masses of Muscovite cavalry. 
How brightly the sun shone, — and how breathlessly we 
waited in that dead silence, only broken by the clink and 
the ring of the horses’ bits and the unsheathing of sabers, 

21 


118 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


UF the Russians came up the valley, those splendid masses 
of cavalry moving en echelon up to the attack. Breath- 
less every man on the slopes and in the valley, French and 
English, soldier and amateur, waited, while the grand line 
of the Muscovite Horse rode on to the 93d, who quietly 
awaited them, motionless and impenetrable as a wall of 
granite, firm and invulnerable as their own Highland sea- 
wall — awaited them, till with their second volley, rolling 
out on the clear morning air, they sent that splendid body 
of horse flying, shivered, like sea-foam breaking on a rock. 
Then came the time for Scarlett and his Heavies — wh.en 
the Russian Lancers, and Hussars, and Dragoons galloped 
over the hill, their squadrons twice our length and more 
than twice our depth, and the trumpets rang out twice, and 
Lord Raglan and his staff, the French generals and their 
masses of infantry, and all the lookers-on gathered up 
yonder on the heights, held their breath when Grays and 
Enniskilleners, with the joyous cheer of the one, the wild 
shout of the other ringing through the air, rushed at the 
massive columns of the Russians, charged in among them, 
shaking their serried masses as a hurricane shakes wood- 
land trees ; and closing with their second line as it came 
up to retrieve the lost honor of the priest-blessed Musco- 
vite lances, mingled pele-mele with them, their swords 
crossing and flashing in the air, reckless of all odds, cut- 
ting their way inch by inch through the dense squadrons 
closing round them — those “beautiful gray horses” pushing 
their road with that dash and daring which had once won 
them Napoleon’s admiration — till the 1st Royals, the 4th 
and 5th Dragoon Guards, rushed in to the rescue, and sent 
the Russian columns flying over the plain like a routed 
herd of cattle without a leader. How the lookers-oii 
cheered them, waving their caps in their hands and shout- 
ing rapturous applause, till the heights rang again, as the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


119 


Brijro lier and liis Heavies rode back from iheir assault! — 
and l>e Vigne muttered, as he glanced down the line of our 
light brigade: 

“By Heaven I what wouldn’t I give to have ridden that 
charge with the Grays I When is our turn to come ?” 

Our turn was near at hand. An hour after we received 
the order to advance on the Russian guns. With the 
blame, on whomsoever it may lie of that rash order, I have 
nothing to do. That vexatious question can never be set- 
tled, since he on whose shoulders they place it lies in the 
valley of Balaklava, the first victim to it that fell, and 
cannot raise his voice to reply, or give the lie, if it be a 
lie, to his calumniators, as he would have done so fearlessly 
in his life. If Louis Nolan were to blame, his passionate 
love for our Arm of the service, and his jealousy over its 
honor, his belief that Light Cavalry would do all and any- 
thing though it were the work of demigods, and his irrita- 
tion that hitherto we had not been given the opportunity 
we might have had, must plead his excuse; and I think 
his daring spirit, his brilliant courage, and the memory of 
that joyous cheer to. his Hussars wdiich ended in the wild 
death-cry which none who heard can ever forget, might be 
enough to silence the angry jar and jangle of contention 
above his grave, and set the seals of oblivion upon his 
error. 

The order was given us to take the Russian guns. For 
the first time since we had landed a light of joy and pleasure 
came into the Colonel’s mournful eyes; and his old proud, 
glad, sunlit smile flashed over De Yigne’s face. We were 
so sick of inaction, of riding about the Chersonese doing 
nothing, and letting other men’s names go home in the 
dispatches I 

The order was given to take the Russian guns. At ten 
minutes past eleven we of the Light Brigade shook our 


120 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


bridles and dashed ofif in the morning sunlight toward the 
Russian battery. Lookers-on tell me they could hardly 
credit that we, so few in numbers, and entirely unsupported, 
were going to charge an army in position, and that they 
gave us up for hopeless destruction as we swept past them 
full gallop, the sunshine catching the points of our sabers 
and flashing off our harness. If they did not credit it, we 
did We knew it was against all maxims of war for cav- 
alry to act without support or infantry at hand. We 
knew that in all probability few indeed, if any of us, would 
ever come back fi:om that rapid and deadly ride. But the 
order was given. There were the guns — and away we 
went, quickening from trot to canter, and from canter to 
gallop, as we drew nearer to them. On we went, spurring 
our horses across the space that divided us from those 
grim fiery mouths. On we went: Sabretasche’s silvery 
voice cheering us on, and the delicate white hand that Bel- 
gravian belles admired pointing to the guns before us; De 
Yigne a little in advance of us all, sitting down in his 
saddle as in by-gone days, when he led the field across 
Northampton pastures or Leicestershire bulfinches, a glow 
upon his face, his eyes flashing fire, his teeth set, his fingers 
clinched on the true steel that had done trusty work for 
him before then among the Indian jungles. On we went. 
All I was conscious of was of a feverish exultation ; a wild, 
causeless delight; a fierce, tiger-like longing to be at them 
and upon them. The ring of the horses’ iron hoofs, the 
chink of the rattling bits, the dashing of chains and sabers, 
the whistle and screech of the bullets as they flew among 
us from the redoubt, all made a music in my ear to which 
my heart beat with delicious excitement. God knows how 
it is, but in such hours as that the last thing one thinks of 
is the death so near at hand. Though men reeled from 
their saddles and fell lifeless to the ground at every step. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


12 


and riderless chargers fled snorting and wounded from our 
ranks; though the guns from the redoubt poured on us as 
we swept past, and volleys of rifles and musketry raked 
our ranks; though every moment great gaps were made, 
till the fire broke our first line, and the second had to fill it 
up ; though from the thirty guns before us poured a deadly 
fire, whose murderous balls fell among us as we rode, 
clearing scores of saddles, sweeping down horses and men, 
and strewing the plain as we passed with quivering human 
bodies, and chargers rolling over and over in their death- 
agony, -f-on we rode, down into that fiery embrace of smoke 
and flame that stretched out its arms and hissed its fell 
kisses at us from the Russian line. His sword whirling 
aud flashing above his head, De Vigue spurred his horse 
into the dense smoke of the blazing batteries. With a 
cheer to his men, in that sweet and silvery voice that had 
whispered such soft love-vows in women’s ears, Sabretasche 
led us in between the guns. Every one was for himself 
then, as we dashed into the battery and sabered the gun- 
ners at their posts, while the oblique fire from the hills, and 
the direct fire of musketry, poured in upon us. Prodigies 
of valor were done there never to be chronicled. Twice 
through the blinding smoke I saw De Yigne beside me — ■ 
the Charmed Life, as they had called him in India — reck- 
less of the storm of balls that fell about him, sitting in his 
saddle as firmly as if he were at a Pytchley meet. We 
had no breathing-time to think of others in that desperate 
struggle, but once I heard Pigott near me shout out, “ The 
Colonel’s down !” Thank God it was not true; down ho 
was, to be sure, for his horse was killed under him by a 
round shot; but Sabretasche sprang up again in an instant, 
as calm and collected as though he were pacing the Ring 
in Hyde Park, vaulted on a riderless charger that was by 
him, and struck down a gunner the next moment, his face 

11 


VOL. II. 


122 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


all the while as pale and as impassive as if he were in a 
drawing-room at home. That wild melee I I can remem- 
ber nothing distinctly in it, save the mad thirst for blood 
that at such a time rises in one as savagely as in a beast of 
prey. A shot struck my left arm, breaking the bone 
above my wrist; but I was conscious of no pain as we 
broke through the column of Russian infantry, sending 
them flying before us, broken and scattered like thistle- 
down upon the wind, and were returning from our charge 
as brilliantly as the Scots and Enniskilleners had returned 
from theirs, when, as you know, the flank fire from the hill 
battery opened upon us — an enemy we could not reach or 
silence — and a mass of Russian Lancers were hurled upon 
onr flank. Shewell and his 8th cut through them — we 
stayed for an encounter, hemmed in on every side, shrouded 
— our little handful of men — by the dense columns of their 
troops. It was hot work, work that strewed the plain 
with the English Light Brigade, as a harvest-field is strewn 
with wheat-ears ere the sheaves are gathered. But we 
should have broken through them still, no matter what the 
odds, for there were deeds of individual daring done in 
that desperate struggle which would make the chillest 
blood glow, and the most lethargic listener kindle into 
admiration. We should have cut through them, coute que 
coiite, but that horrible volley of grape and canister, on 
which all Europe has cried shame, poured on friend and 
loe from the gunners who had fled before our charge, the 
balls singing with their murderous hiss through the air, 
and falling on the striving mass of human life, where Eng- 
lish and Russian fought together, carrying death and de- 
struction with its coward fire into the ranks of both, and 
stamping the Church-blessed troops of the Czar with in- 
effaceable infamy. 

It was with bitter hearts and deadly thoughts that we, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


123 


the remnant of the Six Hundred, rode back, leaving the 
flower of the Light Brigade dead or dying before those 
murderous Russian guns; — and it was all done, all over, 
in five-and-twenty minutes — less than a fox-hunt would 
have taken at home I 

De Yigne was unhurt. The Charmed Life must still 
have had his spell about him, for if any man in the Cavalry 
liad risked danger and courted death that day he had done 
so ; but he rode out of the lines at Balaklava without even 
a scratch. Sabretasche had been hit by a ball which had 
only grazed his shoulder; the delicate and raffine man of 
fashion would have laughed at a much more deadly wound. 
We were not too “fine gentlemen’’ for that work, but rather 
went through it perhaps the better for having come of a 
race that for many generations had never “funked,” and 
bearing names that cowardice or dishonor had never 
touched. With tears standing in his eyes, Sabretasche 
looked back one morning to the plain where so many of 
his Dashers had fallen, torn and mangled in the bloody 
jaws of those grim batteries, the daring spirits quenched, 
the vigorous lives spent, the gallant forms food for the 
worms, and he turned to De Vigne with a mournful smile, 
“(7w^ honoV^ 

True indeed — cui bonof that waste of heroic human 
life. There was a bitter significance in his favorite sar- 
casm, which the potentates, who for their own private ends 
had drenched the Chersonese in blood, would have found 
it hard to answer. Cui bono indeed ! Their bones lie 
whitening there in the valley of Balaklava; fresh fancies 
amuse and agitate the nations ; the Light Cavalry charge 
is coldly criticised and pronounced tomfoolery, and their 
names are only remembered in the hearts of some few 
women whose lives were desolation when they fell. 


124 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


III. 

THE BRIDAL JEWELS GO^ TO THE MONT DE PI^T^. 

In their salon in the Champs Elysees, that crowded, 
gaudy, and much-bedizened room, sat, as they had sat twelve 
months before, old Fantyre and the Trefusis, the old woman 
huddled up among a pile of cushions, shawls, and furs, 
with her feet on a chaiififerette, older and uglier, with her 
wig awry, and her little piercing black eyes roving about 
like a monkey’s as she drank her accustomed demie tasse, 
which, as I before observed, looked most suspiciously like 
cognac undefiled; the younger one, with her coarse, dash- 
ing, full-blown, highly-tinted beauty not shown otf to the 
best advantage, for it was quite early morning, madame 
n’etait pas visible, of course, in common with all Parisi- 
ennes, whether Parisienne by birth or by adoption ; and 
not being visible, the Trefusis had not thought it worth 
her while to dress, but hastily enveloped in a peignoir, 
looked certainly, though she was a fine woman still, not 
exactly calculated to please the taste of a high-born gen- 
tleman used to the sight and the society of delicate aristo- 
crates, (though, truly, before they are made up, some of 

those self-same delicate aristocrates I but, taissons nous I 

If we pried into the composition of the entremets at Ye- 
Bours’ or the Trois Freres, should we enjoy the dainties of 
them ?) 

“Well, my dear, ain’t he killed yet?” demanded old Fan- 
tyre, in her liveliest treble. 

“No,” said the Trefusis, running her eye through the 
returns of the 25th October. “Major Halkett, Captain 
Nolan, Lord Fitzgibbon — lots of them — but ” 

“Not the right one,” chuckled the old Fantyre, who. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


125 


though she had her own private reasons for desiring De 
Vigne’s demise, as his property was so ruled that a con^ 
siderable portion must have come to his wife whether he 
had willed it so or not, had still that exquisite pleasure 
in the Trefusis’s mortification which better people than the 
old Viscountess indulge in now and then at their friends’ 
expense. “ Deuce take the man I Tiresome creature it is; 
shot and saber carry ofi’ lots of pretty fellows out there. 
Why on earth can’t they touch him? And that beautiful 
creature, Vivian Sabretasche, is he all right?” 

“Slightly wounded — that’s all.” 

“How cross you are, my dear. If you must not w'eaf 
widow’s weeds, I can’t help it, can I ? They’re not be- 
coming, my dear — not at all ; though if a woman knows 
how to manage ’em, she may do a good deal under her 
crape. Men ain’t afraid of a widow as they are of an un- 
married woman, though Heaven knows they need be if 
they knew all ; the ‘ dear departed’ ’s a capital dodge to 
secure a new pigeon. Mark rny words, my dear, De Vigne 
won’t die just because you wish him !” 

“Wish him!” reiterated the Trefusis. “How disagree- 
ably you phrase things. Lady Fantyre.” 

“Give ’em their right names, my dear? Yes, I believe 
that Ls uncommon disagreeable for most people,” chuckled 
the old woman. “In my time, you know, we weren’t so 
particular; if we did naughty things (and we did very 
many, my dear, almost as many as people do now!) we 
weren’t ashamed to call ’em by their dictionary names. 
Humbug’s a new-fangled thing, as well as a new-fangled 
word. They say we were coarse; I don’t know, I’m sure; 
I suppose we were ; but I know we didn’t love things under 
the rose and sneak out of ’em in daylight as you nineteenth- 
century people do ; our men, if they went to the casinoes 
H.I night, didn’t go to Bible meetings, and Maintenance- of- 

11 * 


12G 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Immacii ate- Society boards, and Regenerated Magdalens’ 
Refuges the next morning — as they do now-a-days. How- 
ever, if we were more consistent, we weren’t so Christian, 
1 suppose ! Lor’ bless me, what a deal of cant there is 
about in the world now ! even you, whom I did think was 
pretty well as unscrupulous as anybody I ever met, won’t 
allow you’d have liked to see De Yigne among them re- 
turns. I know when poor old Fantyre died. Lady Rouge- 
pot says to me, ‘What a relief, my dear!’ and I’m sure 1 
never thought of differing from her for a minute I You’ve 
never had but one checkmate in your life, Constance — with 
that little girl Trevelyan — Tressillian — what’s her name ?” 

“Little devil!” said the Trefusis, bitterly; she had not 
grown the choicest in her expressions, from constant con- 
tact with the Fantyre. “I saw her again the other day.” 

“Here?” 

“Yes; in the Rue Vivienne — in a fleuriste’s shop. I 
passed her quite close. She knew me again ; I could tell 
that by the scorn there was in her eyes and the sneer that 
came on her lips. Little fool ! with the marriage certifi- 
cate before her very eyes, she wouldn’t believe the truth. 
The scheme was so good it deserved complete success. I 
hate that little thing — such a child as she looks, to have 
put one down and outgeneraled one’s plans.” 

“ Child !’’ chuckled old Fantyre ; “she wasn’t so much of 
a child but what she could give you one of the best retorts 
I ever heard ; ‘ It was a pity you didn’t learn the semblance 
of a lady to support you in the assumption of your role I’ 
Vastly good, vastly good; how delighted Selwyn would 
have been with that.” 

“ Little devil !” repeated the Trefusis again. “ I hate 
the sight of that girl’s great dark-blue eyes. De Vigne 
shall never see her again if I can help it, little, contemptu- 
ous, haughty creature 1” 


GRANVILLE EE VIGNE. 


127 


“ She’s a lady, ain’t she ?” said the Fantyre, dryly 

“I’m sure I don’t know. She Is as proud as a princess, 
though she’s nothing but an artist after all. Good gra- 
cious 1 Who is that?” said the Trefusis, as she heard a 
ring at the entrance, giving a hurried dismayed glance at 
her negligee. “It can’t be Anatole nor De Brissac; they 
iiever come so early.” 

“ If they do, my dear, beauty unadorned, you know ” 

“Stuff!” said the Trefusis, angrily. “Beauty unadorned 
would get uncommonly few admirers in these days. Per- 
haps it’s nobody for us.” 

As she spoke a servant entered, and brought her a 
piece of paper with a few words on it, unfolded and un- 
sealed. 

“What's that, my dear?” asked Lady Fantyre, eagerly. 

“Only my dressmaker,” said the Trefusis, with affected 
carelessness, but with an uneasy frown, which did not 
escape the quick old lady. 

“ Dressmaker I” chuckled the Fantyre, as she was left 
alone. “ If you’ve any secrets from me, my dear, we shall 
soon quarrel. I’ve no objection whatever to living with 
you as long as you have that poor fellow’s three thousand 
a year, and we can make a tidy little income with you to 
attract the young men, and me to play whist and ecarte 
with ’em; but if you begin to hold any cards I don’t see I 
shall throw up the game, though we have played it some 
time together.” 

While old Fantyre — who had this single virtue among 
all her vices, that she was candid about them, more than 
can be said of most sinners — thus talked to herself over 
her cognac and coffee, the Trefusis had gone, demi- 
toilette and all, into the salle, where there awaited her a 
neat, slight, fair man, with a delicate badine and gold 
studs, who looked something between a valet, an actor, 


128 


GRANVILLE PE VIQNE. 


and a would-be dandy — such as you may see by scores 
any day in Oxford Street, or on the Boulevards, hanging 
about the Bads, or lounging in the parterre of the Odeon, 

He smiled, a curious, slight smile, as the Trefusis 
entered. 

“Yous voila, madame I Not en grande tenue to-day; 
too early for your pigeons, I suppose ? I dare say you 
and the old lady make a very good thing out of it, though 
of course you only entertain immaculate society, for fear 
you should give the Major a chance to bring you up 
before a certain law court, eh 

“What did you come for so soon again?” demanded 
the Trefusis, abruptly, with as scant courtesy as might be. 
“I have only five minutes to spare, you had better not 
waste it in idle talk.” 

“What do I come for, ma belle? Now, what should I 
come for? What do I ever come for, pray?” returned 
her visitor, in nowise displeased, but rather amused at her 
annoyance. 

“Money!” retorted the Trefusis, with an angry glare 
“You will get none to-day, I can assure you I” 

The man laughed. 

“Now why always keep up this little farce? Money I 
wish for — money you will give me. Why make the same 
amusing little denial of it every time?” 

“It is no amusing little denial to-day, at all events,” 
said the Trefusis, coldly. “I have none left. I cannot 
give you what I have not.” 

lie laughed, and played a tattoo with the cornelian 
head of his cane. 

“Very well, then I will go to the Major.” 

“You cannot. He is in the Crimea.” > 

“To the Crimea I can go to-morrow, belle amie. in tne 
service of a gentleman who has a faucy to visit it. Bui I 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


129 


am tired of playing the valet, though it is amusing ^inough 
sometimes; and, indeed, as you pay so very badly, I have 
been thinking of writing to De Vigne; he will give me 
anything I ask, for my information.” 

The Trefusis’s eyes grew fiercer, but she turned pale and 
wavered. 

“A line of mine will tell the Major, you know, belle amie 
— and the crime is actionable — and I don’t fancy he will be 
inclined to be very gentle to his wife — nee Lucy Davis, eh ?” 
he went on, amused to watch the changes on her face. He 
will pay very highly, too — what are a few thousands to him ? 
— he is as lavish as the winds, as proud as the devil, and, 
hating Mme. sa femme as he does, he will give me, I have 
no doubt, anything I ask. It will be a much better invest- 
ment for me ; I won’t trouble you any more, Lucy ; I shall 
write to the Major at once.” 

He rose, and took his hat ; but the Trefusis interrupted 
him. 

“Stay — wait a moment — how much do you want?” 

“Fifty pounds now, and as much this day week.” 

“ Impossible I I have not half ” 

“Glad to hear it, madame. The Major will be the much 
better paymaster. With his thousands I can get a life an- 
nuity, buy stock, take shares, do what I like, even — who 
knows ? — become an eminently respectable member of so- 
ciety ! Adieu I belle amie ; when we next meet it will be 
in the law courts over the water.” 

“Villain I” swore the Trefusis, with a fierce flash of her 
black eyes. 

He laughed : 

“Not at all ; you have the monopoly of any villainy there 
may be in the transaction. Adieu I what shall I say from 
you to the Major — any tender message ?” 

“Wait,” cried the Trefusis, hurriedly. “I have five naps 


130 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


— I coulii let you have more to-morrow; and — you could 
take one of my bracelets ” 

“One I No, thank you, the other plan will be best for 
me. I am tired of these installments, and De Yigne ” 

“But — my diamonds, then — the ceinture he was fool 

enough to give me ” She tried to speak coldly, but 

there was a trembling eagerness in her manner which belied 
her assumed calmness. 

“ Fool, indeed ! — and to think he was a man of the 
world ! Your diamonds I — ma chere, you must be in strange 
fear, indeed, to offer me them. They must be worth no 
end, or they would not be the Major’s giving. Those 
bracelets he bought for the Little Tressillian cost a hundred 
the pair, I know : splendid emeralds they were I he thought 
I never saw them, but they laid five minutes on his dressing- 
table before he sealed them up. He was always careless 
tn those things : I believe, aristocrat as he was, he thought 
servants had neither eyes nor ears, instead of having them, 
in point of fact, just doubly acute. Well,” he went on — 
he had only made this lengthened digression to annoy his 
listener — “Well, come, let us look at those diamonds — I 
am willing to spare you, if I can, for old acquaintance 
sake.” 

When he left the house he carried with him that magnifi- 
cent diamond ceinture which De Yigne had bought, in his 
lover’s madness, for his bride nine years before, and took it 
up to the Mont de Piete. Three thousand a year was not 
a bad income, but the Trefusis’s dress, the Fantyre’s wines, 
the petits soupers, and the numerous Paris agremens and 
amusements ran away with it very fast, and though eearte, 
vingt-et-un, and whist added considerably to their re- 
sources, the Trefusis was very often hard up, as people who 
have lived on their wits all their lives not unfrequently are. 
One would fancy such sharpening upon the grindstone of 


GRANVILLE DE VIONE. 


131 


vrant might teach them economy in prosperity; but I don’t 
think it often does ; the canaille ever glory in the vulgar 
pride of money, waste hundreds in grand dinners, and — 
grudge the pineapple. Besides, the Trefusis, too, had a 
drain on her exchequer, of which the world and even 
Argus-eyed old Fantyre was ignorant. 


PART THE TWENTIETH. 

I. 


HOW DE VIGNE MARRED IIIS OWN FATE A SECOND TIME. 

Winter in the Crimea — the Crimea of 1854-55. The 
very words are enough to bring up again to one that sharp, 
stinging wind, of whose concentered cold none can imagine 
in the faintest degree, save those who have weathered a win- 
ter in tents on the barren steppes before Sebastopol. Wri- 
ting those very words is enough to bring up before one the 
bleak, chill, dark stretch of ground, with its horrible roads 
turned to water-courses, or frozen like miles of broken 
glass; the slopes, vast morasses of mud and quagmire, or 
trackless wastes of snow; the hurricane, wild as a tropical 
tornado, whirling the tents in mid-air, and turning men and 
horses roofless into the terrible winter night; the long 
hours of darkness, of storm, of blinding snow, of howling 
wind, of pouring ink-black rain, in which the men in the 
T.renches and the covering parties and pickets watched with 
eyes that must never close and senses that might never 
weary; the days when under those pitiless skies ofBcers 
and men shared alike the common fate, worse clad than a 
beggar, worse cared for than a cab-horse ; — all rise up be* 


i32 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


fore one as by incantation at those mere words, Winter in 
the Crimea. 

I need not dwell upon it; I read the other day that 
people bad heard quite enough of the “undivine story ”*of 
the Russian war. I scarcely know what that epithet may 
mean; wars never, that I am aware of, set up for being 
“divine;” but if we could boast but little divinity among 
us, (and I think the “most eminently pious person” would 
have been tempted to swear hard had such a one been 
present to enjoy the hurricane of the 14th of .November,) 
I fancy the men showed what was better and more to the 
purpose — heroism true and dauntless; the heroism most 
difficult of all in life — the heroism of endurance. I think 
one can want nothing nobler, or so far more “divine,” than 
Tom Trowbridge, with his legs upon the gun-carriage, re- 
fusing to move “till the battle’s won;” or Strangway’s 
gentle “Will any one be kind enough to lift me off my 
horse ?” than the steady work in the trenches in ten hours 
of furious rain and freezing cold; work done day after 
day, night after night, turning out into the mire and misery 
of the traverses with hungry stomachs and clothes that 
were rags? 

My left arm turned out so tedious and tiresome that I 
was obliged to go down to Balaklava for a short time. The 
day before I went up again to the front, anxious, you are 
sure, to be with the Dashers as soon as ever I could, a 
transport came into harbor with a reinforcement of the 
. — th from England. I watched them land; their fresh, 
healthy faces, their neat uniforms, their general trim, and 
all-over-like-going look, contrast enough to the men in the 
trenches at the front; and as I was looking at them dis- 
embark I saw a face I knew well, indeed — the face fair and 
delicate as a girl, with his long light curls and his blue 
eyes, and his lithe slight figure, of Curly, our little Curlv 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


133 


of Fnistonhills. Twelve months before, as I have said, 
Curly had changed from his captaincy in the Coldstreams 
to the lieutenant-colonelcy of the — th, and had been 
savage enough at having done so when the Household 
Troops went out to the Crimea; but now his turn had 
come, to his own unspeakable satisfaction, for Curly had 
always longed to have a taste of that real campaigning 
which De Vigne had invariably passionately assured us 
was the sole good thing in life. We met as old friends 
did meet out there, doubly bound together by a common 
cause, and we had a long haver that night, over pipes and 
some of the pure cognac he had brought out with him to 
the land where brandy, like everything else, was filthy, 
adulterated, and fabulously priced ; of mutual acquaintance 
and topics of mutual interest; of the things that had been 
done in England since we left, and the things we had done 
ourselves in the Chersonese. Knowing nothing of those 
fierce words which had passed betweerx Curly and De 
Vigne, I was surprised at the silence witii which Curly 
listened to my details of the heroic pluck v/ith which 
our Frestonhills hero had cut his way through the Russian 
squadrons on the morning of the 25th; knowing nothing, 
either, of the wild love which had entered into them both 
for the same woman, 1 set my foot in it unawares by asking 
him if he had seen the Little Tressillian before he left. 
Curly, though Heaven knows life had seasoned him as it 
nad seasoned us all, till our faces could be as silent and im- 
passive under the most stinging mental pain as any soulless, 
bloodless statue’s, busied himself with poking up his pipe, 
while a flush rose over his fair girlish brow, and the muscles 
of his lips twitched nervously, as he answered simply, 
^^No!” 

“No! What, didn’t you even go to bid her good-by? 
I thought you admired that little thing beyond expression, 
TOL. n. 12 


134 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


though she used to compliment Sir Folko at your and ray 
expense? Do you mean to say you never went down to 
St. Crucis before you came off here ?” 

“For Heaven’s sake, Arthur, hold your tongue!” said 
Curly, more sharply than I had ever heard him speak; he 
who, when Poulteuey Hay had forged the check in his name 
for 500Z., had begged us not to be hard on “the poor dear 
fellow,” and had busied himself in hushing the matter up 
as anxiously as though he were the criminal. “It is 
grossest brutality to jest on such a subject.” 

“Brutality to ask after the Little Tressillian ?” I re- 
peated, in sheer amazement. “ My dear fellow, what on 
earth do you mean? What has happened to Alma? Is 
she dead ?” 

“Would to Heaven she were, rather than what they say 
she is: another added to Yane Castleton’s list of victims !” 

The anguish in his voice was unmistakable. I stared at 
him in amazement. The Little Tressillian gone over to 
Yane Castleton 1 That girl whose face was truth, and 
innocence, and candor in itself; who had seemed never 
happy save in De Yigne’s presence ; who had lavished on 
him whenever she saw him such fond, enthusiastic words, 
with all a woman’s eloquence and all a child’s abandon ! I 
stared at him in mute bewilderment. The bursting of 
Whistling Dick between us at that moment would not 
have startled or astonished me more. 

“Alma — Yane Castleton! My dear Curly, there must 
be some mistake.” 

“God knows!” he answered between his teeth. “/ do 
not credit it, yet there are the facts: She has left St. Cru- 
cis; her nurse saw her leave in Castleton’s brougham, and 
she has never returned. She must have been deluded 
away; she never could have gone willingly. He may have 
lured her with a false marriage. God knows! women are 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


135 


sometimes dazzled by rank, aijd lie is bad enough for 
anything. I should have found him out to know the truth, 
and shot him dead if he had beguiled her away against 
her will, but I never heard of it until the very day before 
we sailed. I could not leave my regiment at the eleventh 
hour.” 

“Do you care so much for her, then?” I said, involun- 
tarily, in surprise; for, though I knew Curly had often 
sworn the Little Tressillian was the most charming thing 
he had ever come across, he had lavished equally enthusi- 
astic epithets on no end of other women, and I never 
dreamt he had felt anything deeper for her. 

“I loved her very dearly,” said Curly, simply, with his 
pipe between his lips. “Don’t talk of it again, Arthur, 
please ; she cared nothing for me, but her name is too 
precious to me to hear it mentioned without respect, and 1 
am sure there is some error yet. -I will never believe her 
face told a lie.” 

■ He was silent; and since the loss of Alma had stung 
him so keenly and so deeply that not even the elasticity of 
his gay, light, affectionate nature could rebound or recover 
from it, it was easy to understand how it had overwhelmed 
De Vigne’s stronger, more fiery, more vehement, and far 
more retentive nature, if, as I doubted not, the love that 
Sabretasche had predicted had come between himself and 
the Little Tressillian. 

Tlie fierce words that had passed between them were 
not forgotten. De Yigne was not a man to forgive in a 
moment that bitter accusation of cowardice, which no one 
out Curly would have breathed to him without receiving 
punishment, whose mark he would have carried on him all 
his life. Curly, with reasons of his own for believing that, 
true or untrue, the story of Alma’s flight with Vane Cas- 
tletou, the heart of the woman he loved was De Vigne’s, 


136 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and De Yigne’s alone, spught no reconciliation with hia 
once idolized Frestonhills hero. Perhaps he harbored a 
suspicion — unjust indeed, but men in love and jealous of 
their rivals seldom pause to do them justice — that it was 
to Granville, and not to Yane Castleton, Alma had flown, 
for he knew De Yigne was so thorough a soldier that he 
would have left the most exquisite happiness, or the woman 
he most tenderly loved, at any call to arms. They seldom 
met — De Yigne being in Lord Lucan’s camp, and Curly in 
that of the Light Division — and they avoided each other 
by mutual consent. The love of woman had come between 
them, and stretched like a great gulf between De Yigne 
and the young fellow he had liked ever since he was a little 
fair-haired, bright-eyed boy. 

Curly came just in time for that gray wintry dawn, when 
the bells of Sebastopol rang through the dark, foggy air, 
and the dense masses of troops, for whom mass had been 
said, stole through the falling rain up the heights of the 
valley of Inkermann. He was in time for those hand-to- 
hand struggles — those wild assaults, those daring repulses, 
with which, in glen, and glade, and valley, in separate 
knots and remote corners, amid thick rain and tangled 
brushwood, and thorny brakes and foggy gloom, through 
which they could see neither enemy nor friend — in which 
the steady heroism of England and the dashing gallantry 
of France repelled the picked troops of the Muscovite, 
stimulated by brandy, assured of victory by their Czar’s 
son, and promised the best joys of Heaven by their priests 
if they should fall. He was in time to rush to the front 
with the rest of the Light Division on that dark and des- 
perate morning, when the Duke and his Guards held the 
Sandbag Battery under the deadly mitraille and the vol- 
leys of rifle and musketry ; when officers dropped like hail, 
singled out, as they ever are, in the onslaught j when Cath- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


cart fell with the bullet through his brain, and Sir George 
Brown was carried wounded off the field, and the Zouaves 
dashed to the rescue at their merry Pas de charge, and the 
Chasseurs d’Afrique, on their gray Arabs, charged with all 
the brilliance and elan of their nation; and all through 
the dark, gloomy valley raged those fierce struggles, those 
desperate rallies, those sanguinary combats hand to hand, 
which made up the battle of Inkermann, and strewed the 
wet, marshy ground with groups, under every bush and in 
every ravine, of the bearskins of our Guards, the gray 
great-coats of the Russians, and the bright-blue uniforms 
of the Chasseurs, the men lying pele-mele together as they 
had fallen in the death-grapple — some calm, tranquil, with 
their lips just open as the rifle had hit them down, life 
ceasing instantaneously ; others horrible to look upon, with 
every feature wrung in the agonies of their last throes 
clinching the grass they had torn up in their suffering as 
existence had passed slowly, unwillingly, agonizingly away. 

Curly was in time for Inkermann — that battle where not 
twenty thousand English and French repulsed fifty thou- 
sand or more Russians, which was heroic as Thermopylae, 
sanguinary as Maya; and he was in time for the winter 
work in the trenches, where he, so late the young Adonis 
of the Guards, the “best style” in the Park, the fashion- 
able young blondin, the darling of Belgravian boudoirs, 
who at home never began his day till two o’clock — a day 
of morning calls, of dejeuners, of flirtations, of gay mess- 
luncheons, of gayer opera-suppers, with his dinners per- 
fection, with his wines of the best, and his greatest ex- 
ertion to get up in time for Epsom, or cram all his 
engagements into one night — had to turn into the trenches 
in rain which made the traverses like Dutch dykes, or in 
blinding snow blown into his eyes by a wind that cut into 
bim sharply as any bayonet’s thrust; to come back to a 
12 * 


1^8 


GTRANVILLE BE VIGNE, 


tent without fire, to food either semi-raw or else burnt 
black as a cinder; to sleep rudely, roused by a hurricane 
that whirled away his sole frail shelter, and turned him 
out into the bitter black Crimean night. That winter 
showed us campaigning with the gloss off; there were no 
marches through pleasant countries, no halts at villages 
or towns, no billeting in different places, where there was 
change of scene, and wine, and pretty women, as our 
fathers and grandfathers had had in the Peninsula; no 
brilliant succession of battles, the space between each 
filled up with the capture of fallen cities, and balls and 
love-making in friendly ones, such as make the history of 
the war among the green sierras of Spain so favorite a 
theme for fiction and romance; there was nothing but an 
eternal cannonading from the dawn of one day to the dawn 
of another — nothing but a long, dreary, protracted siege, 
and confinement to a camp, to get away from which a re- 
connoissance party was hailed with delight — nothing but 
months dragging away one after another, seeing horses 
and men dying off by scores. 

We should soon have been dismounted if we had not 
been ordered into Balaklava — our light sinewy, fiery, gal- 
lant grays lay rotting in heaps, or stiffened and frozen in 
the mud. The first thing that seemed to soften the stern, 
silent gloom that had gathered round De Yigne was when 
his horse, Sultan, that followed him like a dog and took 
sugar from his hand, and that had brought him safe out of 
'^he lines at Balaklava, weakened with starvation and frozen 
;yith cold, turned his dying eyes upon his master, shivered, 
rolled on his side, and died with one last faint gasping sigh. 
It was the only thing he thought that loved him, and De 
Vigne loved it in return ; the gray had been a truer friend 
than man, a more faithful one than woman. He stooped 
over the horse where he lay and kissed him on the fore- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


139 


head, and his eyes were dim as he turned away from the 
dead charger that had served him so long and had died so 
painfully — token that, despite the ice that his cruel wrong 
and his great anguish had closed around him, the warm 
loving heart of the man was still beating strong within 
him. The sufferings of his men around him, too — the men 
who all braved that winter, never despaired, rarely com- 
plained, and kept stout hearts through all their unspeak- 
able wretchedness, their extremity of misery, while England 
seemed to forget and to neglect them; — absorbed as De 
Vigne was by that passionate and bitter love which had 
cost him so dear, he exerted himself to the utmost to 
alleviate these sufferings, and it was well for him that he 
was forced from himself into the midst of the misery around 
him. He was furious that the army should be left to suffer 
and rot here, while in England they persisted in believing 
that we had all we could possibly want. If by paying down 
all his fortune he could have brought to the Crimea the 
huts, the warm clothing, the medicines, the supplies, the 
reserves of strong able-bodied regiments that we wanted, 
I believe he would have done it without pause or regret. 
As it was, where the commonest necessaries became luxu- 
ries scarcely to be bought at the most extravagant prices, 
he could do little or nothing. As it was, he had to stand 
by and see men and horses dying away for simple lack of 
care and shelter; the flower of that army wasted, which — 
a soldier’s son — he loved as devotedly as Quintus Curtius 
Rome; holding his own life as nothing could he by any 
personal sacrifice have given any aid or added any glory 
to the Service, caring nothing as long as he had oppor- 
tunity to do his best, and justice done his regiment, whether 
liis own deeds were unnoticed or rewarded with a line in 
the Gazette He did all he could to cheer and animate 
the men, and they listened to him as to a demi-god, rever- 


140 


GRANVILLE LE VIGNE. 


ing him for those slashing back-handed strokes which bad 
cut his way for him tlirough the carnage at Balaklava, and 
having a sort of superstitious belief in bis Indian sobriquet 
of the “ Charmed Life.’^ The exertions which his devotion 
to the Service impelled him to, did him a certain good — it 
roused him a little from the dead gloom which had closed 
around him ; the sufferings he saw and could not aid, not 
those of wounds and death — to such he was accustomeu — 
but the sufferings of disease which common aid might have 
prevented ; of privations excelling those of beggars, wnich 
he justly thought a disgrace to an age of civilization and 
luxury — these, to a certain extent softened that harsh and 
bitter indifference to every living thing wnich had grown 
upon him, and the reality of the life he led awoke him in 
a degree from his own thoughts; while at the same time 
the weary inactivity of the siege, which weighed down even 
the lightest hearts before Sebastopol, was but one long tor- 
ture to a man who longed for danger and excitement as the 
sole anodyne to a passion which pursued him as the Furies 
pursued Orestes. 

Those who knew Sabretasche as we had known him, the 
luxurious owner of the luxurious Bilcoosha; as the fastidi- 
ous man of fashion, of art, of taste, whose senses were so 
refined at once by nature and by indulgence, that he shrank 
from everything that was not the highest perfection of re- 
finement, as the young Mozart shrank from a discordant 
chord and fainted at the harsh notes of a horn — those who 
knew as I did that all his life long there had been no ele- 
gance, no beauty he had not gathered round him to shut 
out the coarser and harsher material world, would have 
wondered at the simple uncomplaining heroism with which 
he bore deprivations and discomforts, at the mere recital of 
which he would have shuddered and turned away twelve 
months before, asking you, with his soft low laugh, “Not 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 14 i 

to jar on his feelings with such distressing and distasteful 
details I” Many of those who had sneered (behind his 
back) at his Sybaritism, bore the miseries of that Crimean 
winter far less uncomplainingly and gallantly than the high- 
bred gentleman who came from the heart of the most refined 
luxury, with all his aristocrat’s habits, his artist’s tastes, his 
inborn fastidiousness, into greater'privation, discomfort, and 
wretchedness, than any not present there can imagine, to 
endure a campaign, where the wild Chersonese hurricane 
turned him out at night, shelterless, to the full fury of the 
storm ; where his food was often such as at home he would 
have forbidden to be given to his Newfoundland; where 
his servant had sometimes to fight with another for some 
scanty brushwood to light his fire ; where loathsome centi- 
pedes crawled over his very bed ; where he had to wade 
through mud, and rain, and filth, over paths marked out 
by the sick and dying fallen by the roadside, and the car- 
rion birds whirling aloft over the spot where the corpses 
lay. Yet I never heard him utter a complaint, except, 
indeed, when he turned to me with a smile : 

“ How horrible it is, Arthur, not to be able to wash one’s 
hands I” * 

The winter in the Chersonese was contrast enough to 
the life of love, and luxury, and joy he had painted with 
all the brilliance of his poet’s mind, all the tenderness of 
his lover’s heart, sitting in Violet Molyneux’s boudoir, 
looking into the loving, radiant eyes of the woman who 
should now have been his wife I He was uniformly gentle 
and kind to those with whom he came in contact; his very 
delicacy and extreme sensitiveness, joined to his proud 
hatred of anything like pity or discussion, made him hide 
as much as was possible the deadly grief he carried with 
him day and night. Sometimes he would exert himself to 
talk in something of his old strain, though he never affected 




GRANV^ILLE DE VIGNE. 


to conceal that he had lost all in losing her; and beneath 
the sad, grave gentleness of his manner, it was easy to see 
how bitterly his heart was aching — aching with that dull, 
hopeless anguish for which time has no cure. One night, 
just before we were ordered into Balaklava, a friend of his, 
a member of the Lower House, who had come out to have 
a look at the Crimea, and was staying on board one of the 
vessels in the harbor, was dining with Sabretasche — De 
Vigne, a French colonel of cavalry, whom Sabretasche 
had known in Paris, a man of the 9th Lancers, and myself, 
making up the party. All of us thought of the Colonel’s 
charming dinners in Park Lane or the Dilcoosha; of his 
rare wines, his exquisite cookery, his noiseless servants, his 
perfect appointments, his choice company — the best wits 
the greatest authors, the men of highest ton, as w'e sat 
down to this, the best money could procure, and miracu- 
lously luxurious for the Crimea — a turkey, some preserved 
beef, and a little jam, with some brandy and whisky, for 
which his man had paid a price you would not believe, if I 
recorded it parole d’honneur. 

“I am equally glad to see you, Carlton,” said Sabre- 
tasche, “but I’m afraid I can’t entertain you quite so well 
as I did in Park Lane. II faut manger pour vivre, else I 
fancy you would hardly be inclined to touch much of any- 
thing we can give you in the Crimea.” 

“Peste, Sabretasche! il ne pensera guere a cela; nous 
avons ici la meilleure chose — notre Amphitryon,” said De 
Courcy-Ileynal, with a warmth that meant more than mere 
Parisian courtesy. 

“Quite true, monsieur,” said Carlton, “ Sabretasche’s 
wines 'ivere perfection, but they were not what made those 
‘little dinners’ of his the most delightful things in town. 
I wonder when we shall have you back among us. Colonel ?” 
. “Not till we’ve given the Muscovites such a thrashing 


GRANVILLE BE VTGNE. 


143 


as they’ll never get over,” said Egerton of the 9th — those 
dashing Lancers who were cut up at Baiaklava almost to 
a man ; which remark was a prelude to such a aiscussion 
of tactics, probabilities, justice and injustice, what had been 
done that shouldn’t have been done; and what hadn’t been 
done that should have been done, with all the different 
versions of the Light Cavalry charge, as was certain to 
take place where there were five cavalry men talking, and 
an amateur who wanted to hear everything we had to tell 
him. 

“ You’re quite a heros de roman, De Yigne, in England,” 
laughed Carlton. “Lady Puffdoft* and scores of your old 
loves are gone more mad about you than ever, and have 
been working their snowy fingers to the bone over all sorts 
of wool things for you and the rest of the Dashers, that are 
now tumbling about in the holds, and will rot in Baiaklava 
harbor, I suppose, till the hot weather comes.” 

“Heros de roman I” said De Vigne, with his most con- 
temptuous sneer. “If the people at home would just 
believe the men are dying away here, more than three 
thousand sick in camp, and would provide for them with 
just a little common practical sense, instead of sending us 
unroasted coffee, and stoves that may kill the fellows as 
they killed poor Smeaton of the Artillery, and letting the 
warm clothing rot in the holds, and the huts go to pieces on 
the beach, they’d do us more service than by writing bal- 
lads about us, and showering poetical epithets on us that 
they’ll forget in twelve months’ time, when they are run- 
ning after some new hobby.” 

De Vigne spoke prophetically I 

“But you still like campaigning, despite it all, old fel- 
low ?” asked Carlton. 

“I wish my life could be one long campaign,” said De . 
V/gne, his eyes flashing with something besides even his 


144 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


love for the Service; then he laughed, as he went on, 

1 were a medical man, and had to deal with hypochon- 
driacs, frenzied poets, nervous litterateurs, or worn-out 
public men, I would send them all off to active service. 
Boot and Saddle would soon have all the nonsense out of 
them, and send them back much healthier and better fel- 
lows. Campaigning is the only thing to put a dash of 
cayenne pepper into the soup of life.” 

“Our cayenne gets rather damped here,” smiled Sabre- 
tasche. “I remember when I was five-and-twenty, and 
lounged down the shady side of Pall Mail, I thought 
nothing would be so pleasant as a hot campaign in India; 
and when I had had five years of hot campaigning, I thought 
nothing would be so pleasant as the shady side of Pall 
Mall. It was very agreeable as far as the danger and ex- 
citement went, but I confess I preferred my house in Park 
Lane to a tent for continuous residence. I missed my studio 
. — to sketch with the thermometer at 130 was simply im- 
possible. I had plenty of models, but no marble, no chisel, 
and no time. I missed my Times, my reading-chair, my 
periodicals, ray papers; above all, society. All these are 
great agr^raens of life.” 

“But confess. Colonel, weren’t you less fastidious and 
less dandified after India than before ?” asked Be Vigne. 

“ I never was much of a dandy. I dress well, of course ; 
any man of good taste does that by simple instinct. As 
for fastidiousness, I managed with a shirt a week in India, 
because I couldn’t have more; but I hated it, and had one 
or two per diem as soon as ever I went back. I let ray 
beard grow there because I had no possible time to have 
it shaved; but I was delighted to have it off again as soon 
as ever I reached Calcutta ” 

“ Nonsense 1 What are shirts or beards, compared with 
the verve, the excitement, the reality of existence that 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


145 


one finds in active service? I remember one night, when 
X was riding through a hilly pass in Lahore, with only my 
man Niel with me, we were set upon by half a dozen 
mountain robbers, some ten miles north of Attock, where 
the road, shelving on a precipice, wasn’t more than twenty 
paces wide. I shot one of the devils dead, the other re- 
volver flashed in the pan, and poor Niel rolled over the 
precipice, carrying his foe with him, in their death-grapple. 
There was I, single-handed against those four brutes, and 
I never enjoyed anything better.” 

“Of course. How did it end?” 

“Oh! in nothing wonderful,” continued He Yigne. “I 
set my back against the rock and defended myself as well 
as I could. I ran one of them through the body, and be- 
fore I could draw my sword out one of them sent his spear 
into my wrist. I’ve the mark of it now. That put up my 
blood. I pitched one poor wretch over the rock ; another 
turned and fled, yelling out it must be that curred Fering- 
hee, the ‘Charmed Life,’ it was no use trying to kill me; 
and I held the last, and gave him such a drubbing with 
the flat side of my saber that I left him there prostrate, 
and utterly unconscious to anything that happened. My 
horse had been grazing quietly, I caught him easily, and 
galloped back to Attock considerably elated, I assure you. 
Could a soilless shirt and a smooth chin outweigh an hour 
of real life like that?” 

“Certainly not. If our days here were all twenty-fifths 
of October, they would be too delightful,” said Sabretasche, 
with that sad smile which, when he exerted himself to be 
cheerful, showed how painful and unreal the effort was. 
“All I say is, my dear Granville, that I do prefer an 
Auxerre carpet to this extremely perilous mud ; that I do 
like much better to have nice hot water and almond soap, 
to being only able to wash my hands at very distant iuter- 
VOL. II. 13 


146 


GRANVILLE DE V'IGNE. 


vals. It would be ridiculous to pretend that I don’t xhink 
a dinner at the Star and Garter more palatable than this 
tough turkey ; nor my usual Bond Street coats more agreea- 
ble to wear than these ragged and nondescript garments !” 

“And yet one has nev^er heard a word of complaint from 
that fellow from our first bivouac till now 1” said De Yigne 
to Carlton. Granville had an evident attachment to the 
Colonel, strengthened, if possible, by the uncomplaining 
courage and gallantry with which, in common with almost 
all there, the man of fashion and refinement bore every 
deprivation. ' 

honoV' smiled Sabretasche. “It all comes in the 
fortune of war, and it is a soldier’s duty to take whatever 
turns up, whether it is exactly to his taste or not. Besides, 
there is not a murmur heard out here; the Dashers will 
hardly set the example! Come, Carlton, you have not 
told us half the news.” 

Carlton told us plenty of news: of marriages and deaths; 
intrigues of the boudoir and the cabinet; of who had won 
the Grand Military, and who was favorite for the Cesare- 
witch — that race due to the Romanoff, whose forces lay in 
the great city we besieged ; of how Dunbar had married 
Ela Ashburnham, and Jack Mortimer’s wife run away with 
his groom ; of how Fitzturf had been outlawed for seventy 
thousand, and Monteith made a pot of money at the Octo- 
ber meetings; of all the odds and ends of the chat, on 
dits, scandales, and gossip he had brought from the lobby, 
the clubs, and the drawing-room ; of that set of which we 
were members. 

“I say, De Yigne,” said he, at the last, “do you remem- 
ber that bewitching Little Tressillian that was at the ball 
in Lowndes Square, and that all the men went so mad 
about? You knew her very well, though, didn’t you?” 

Carlton had never heard of the extreme intimacy be- 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


14T 


tween De Yigne and Alma, and never guessed on what 
dangerous ground he trod ; Sabretasche had gone back in 
thought t(5 that ball in Lowndes Square, where life and lovo 
had smiled so sweetly on him; I longed to check him, out 
I could not; even by the feeble lamplight I could see De 
Vigne’s face grow crimson with the blood that leapt into 
it; then a gray, ashy paleness grew over it, all hue of 
color leaving his very lips. He had need then of his iron 
nerve. 

“What of her 

Carlton never noticed the chill stern tone of those brief 
words, hissed rather than spoken between his set teeth. 

“ What of her ? Only that people say she levanted with 
that cursed fool, Vane Castleton. I pity her if she did I 
But she won’t be the first woman idiot enough to have 
believed him. I fancy it’s true, too, because as I camo 
through Paris — where I know he is— on my way here, I 
saw her in a carriage in the Champs Elysees that was wait- 
ing at a door — a very dashing carriage, too. I didn’t 
know her enough to speak to her, but I recognized her 
blue eyes in a second — it’s a face you can’t forget. I 
should have thought she’d been a nicer little thing than 
that, wouldn’t you ? But, bless you, women are all alike.” 

De Yigne sat quite still without moving a muscle, but I 
knew all he felt by the iron rigidity, the death like pallor 
of his face, for I had seen it on his marriage-day. Hap- 
pily for him, at that moment an orderly came to the door 
with a dispatch from headquarters to Sabretasche, and De 
Yigne, rising, bid us good night, and went out into the 
storm of pitiless, drenching, driving rain to seek his own 
tent. 

Those two men had chatted over the tough turkey and 
the brandy, listening and laughing as though no curse 
were gnawing at their heart-strings; yet when he was alone 


148 


GRANVILLE DE ™NE. 


Sabretasche took from his breast a little miniature that, 
when his horse went down at Balaklava, had swung loose 
from his uniform by its gold cable-chain, and that he 
had stopped, even in the midst of that wild work, with the 
balls whistling around him, to put safely back in its resting- 
place — a miniature he had painted in the earliest days of 
their engagement, Violet’s lovely face, half laughing, half 
tender, turned over her shoulder, and looking at him with 
those fond soft eyes, into which Heaven knew whether he 
might ever look again ; and over the senseless ivory, which 
seemed to give her back to him in cruel and mocking sem- 
blance, Sabretasche bowed his head in bitterness unspeak- 
able at the thought of that life-long barrier which stood 
ruthlessly between them. And He Vigne, whose iron nerve 
his comrades envied, and whose strength his enemies feared, 
groped his way through the storm and the darkness, in- 
sensible to the wild battle of wind and rain, and entering 
his own tent dizzily and unconsciously as though he had 
been suddenly stricken with blindness, threw himself for- 
ward on his narrow bed with one wild prayer from his 
breaking heart, “My God ! my God ! that I could die !” 

The next morning a mail came in, (our own letters were 
lying in a heap at the tumble-down British post-office, where 
we posted them, often with very little hope that they would 
find their way to their destinations :) there were some from 
Violet, I think, by the flush that rose on the Colonel’s im- 
passive face as he received his epistles, and there were more 
than a dozen for De Vigne, some from men who really 
liked him, and with whom hors de vue was not always 
hors d’esprit; some from Leila Pufldoff, and women of her 
genre, who liked to write to one of the most distinguished 
men of the famous Light Brigade, to whom in days gone 
by they had used to make love. He read them pour 
fl’amuser. The last he took up struck him keener than a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


149 


•Baber's thrust — it was in Alma Tressillian’s handwriting. 
Twenty-four hours before how eagerly he would haya 
seized it, hoping against hope for a reassurance of that 
love which alone made life of value to him; an explana- 
tion of that mystery which had robbed him so strangely 
and suddenly of her. But now, so skeptical of all good, so 
credulous of all evil, as he had grown, he never for a mo- 
ment doubted, or dreamed of doubting, Carlton’s story. 
Circumstantial evidence damned her, and with that mad 
haste which had cost him so much all his life long, without 
waiting or pausing, but allowing her no trust, no justice, 
not even a hearing, as he tore her letter open, for the mo- 
ment with a wild and suffocating hope trembling at his 
heart; he flung it from him, with an oath and a groan, as 
he saw its heading, “No. 100, Champs Elysees, Paris.” 
It was confirmation only too strong of Carlton’s tale for 
him to doubt it. Going, as people often do from one ex- 
treme to the other, he who had been in his early youth far 
too trusting, was now in his manhood equally far too 
skeptical. Over-confidence had lost him his liberty; over- 
doubt now lost him his love. A folly one way had tied 
him to the Trefusis; a folly in another way now robbed 
him of Alma. 

“lie has deserted her, and she turns to me to befool 
me a second time !” was the mad thought with which he 
flung her letter from him. It was a cruel, an unjust, an 
ungenerous suspicion; though appearances might tell 
against her, he had no right to condemn her unheard; 
her lips had never lied to him ; her eyes had never fallen 
beneath his most searching gaze ; he had never heard from 
her an indelicate thought, a coarse word, a feeling that was 
uoi noble, high, and true ; he had no right, unheard, to 
condemn her as the most artful, the most heartless, the 
most unprincipled actress and intriguante. How he could 

13* 2/1 


ioO 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


think it, with the memory of her fond, frank affection; 
after the interchange of thought and opinion that had 
passed so long between them, I cannot imagine. His only 
excuse is, that he was well-nigh mad at the time, and knew 
not what he did while the agony of disbelief was on him ; 
his grief was a wild delirium, from which his skepticism 
excluded every possibility of hope, and in which, in the 
first sting of agony at his betrayal, he sealed her letter again 
without reading it, and directed it back to her before his 
purpose should fail him. So, in our madness, we fling our 
happiness av/ay I One letter still remained unread, indeed 
unnoticed, in the torrent of emotion awakened by the sight 
of Alma Tressillian’s writing, which He Vigne never saw 
until he took it up to light his pipe late that night; then 
he opened it mechanically, glanced over it, saw the signa- 
ture was “Your humble servant, Charles Raymond,” the 
valet whom he had discharged for reading Alma’s little 
note in Gloucester Place : “A begging letter, of course,” 
thought He Vigne, too heart-sick with his own anguished 
thoughts to pay more heed to it, as he struck a match, held 
it in the flame, and lighted his meerschaum with it. 

So we throw aside, as valueless cards, the honors life 
deals us in its uncertain whist. 


II. 


THE GAZELLE IN THE TIGER’S FANGS. 

Vane Castleton had gone mad about Alma. I do not 
mean that he loved her, as poor Curly did, well enough to 
marry her; nor as De Vigne, who would have thrown 
everything away to win her ; but he was wild about her 
as very heartless men, cheres demoiselles, can be wild about 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


15 . 


a face that has bewitched them. He was first of all fasci- 
nated by those “beaux yeux bleus;’' then he was piqued by 
the wish to rival De Yigne, whom he disliked for some 
sharp sayings Granville had sometimes thrown carelessly 
at him ; then, he was maddened by Alma’s contemptuous 
treatment of him — certainly she was very provocative, with 
her eyes flashing angrily, and her soft, child-like lips curled 
in haughty yet petulant annoyance ; and at last he swore 
to go there no more, to be treated de haut en bas by “that 
bewitching little devil,” but to win her, coute que coute. 
She might hate him, he did not care for that; he did not 
think, with Montaigne, that a conquest, to be of value, 
must be de bonne volonte on the part of the captured ; 
and if he had been in the East he would have sent his 
slaves, had her blindfolded, and kept her in his seraglio, 
without regard as to whether tears or smiles were the con- 
sequence. Not being able to act so summarily, he — feeling 
certain that he should never win her of her own free will, 
for Alma’s dislike to him was undisguised, and long years 
before he had entered the lists with De Yigne and been 
cut down, as most men were in that sort of game, by Gran- 
ville, and the House of Tiara having been, from time im- 
memorial, as eccentric as Wharton and as unscrupulous as 
the Mohawks — he hit upon a plan seemingly more fitted 
for by-gone days than for our practical and prosaic age, 
where police prevent all escapades, and telegraphs antici- 
pate all denouements. But the more eccentric the thing 
the more pleasure was it to Castleton, who had something 
of the vanity of Sedley, and liked to set the town talking 
of his bad deeds, as other men liked to make it gossip of 
their great ones; he liked to out-Herod Herod, and his 
reputation for unscrupulous vice was as dear to him as 
though it had been the fame of the soldier or the states- 
man : he loved his mere approach to damn a woman’s char- 


152 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


aoter a la Caligula, and if he could win Alma by some plot 
which would increase his notoriety — tant mieux 1 

On the morrow of De Yigne’s declaration of love to her, 
Alma sat in her bay-window, waiting to catch the first 
faint music of his horse’s hoofs upon the highway. She 
had done nothing that morning; her easel had lost all 
charm for her ; Sylvo and Pauline obtained but little at- 
tention ; and after she had filled the room with flowers to 
give him a brighter welcome, singing soft yet wild Italian 
barcarolles and love songs while she gathered them, till the 
goldfinches and the thrushes strained their throats to rival 
her, she threw herself down on the steps of the window, 
only guarded from the noontide sun by the chestnut-boughs, 
to watch for her lover’s coming, full of that feverish, im- 
passioned joy which can scarcely credit its own being. To 
Violet Molyneux happiness came as the meridian sunlight 
comes after the bright dawn, a deeper gold, indeed, but 
still only an intensifying of the sunrays that had gilded her 
cloudless life before. To Alma, accustomed to a solitary, 
thoughtful, and intellectual childhood with Boughton Tres- 
sillian, taught sorrow by his death, and trial by the almost 
destitution from which her talent alone had rescued her, 
leading a lonely and — but for her great gift, the elasticity 
of her spirits, and the resources of her own mind — a sad 
life for so young and lively a girl, it came like the burst of 
a Southern sunset, rising in all its deep-hued glories, its 
purple, and crimson, and golden splendor, passing the 
pomp of emperors ; out of the funereal gloom of tempest- 
clouds, bathing all the earth that lay quivering from the 
death-grip of the storm in its own radiant and voluptuous 
light. At all times impressionable and enthusiastic — - 
readily touched into happiness by the smallest ray of 
pleasure, as a sun-flower will turn at the first beam after a 
shower — the rapturous joy which had banished sleep, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


153 


but given her waking thoughts sweeter than any night- 
dreams, seemed to her now too great for reality. Under 
her gayety and child-like abandon there were vehement 
])assions, the heritage of that Italian blood which Bough- 
ton Tressillian had said flowed in her veins ; her warmth 
and impatience of nature were the traits of her character 
akin to De Yigne’s, and those few hours with him yester- 
day had aroused all the impassioned affections which had 
been but half conscious of their existence, till told their 
own strength by the whispers of his love and the touch 
of his caresses. 

Exquisitely happy as she was in memory and hope, she 
wanted him with her again to tell her it was no dream; 
fjhe was restless, longing to hear his voice, counting the 
minutes till those dark and brilliant eyes should look once 
more into hers. When noon had passed, her restlessness 
grew into anxiety — she had unconsciously expected him 
quite early; with a union of child-like and lover-like im- 
patience she had risen almost with her friends the birds, 
half hoping, I dare say, that he might surprise her at 
breakfast. Twenty times that morning had she run down 
to the gate, never heeding the soft summer rain that fell 
upon her golden hair, to look along the road for his horse 
and its rider. About one o’clock she stood leaning over 
the little wicket — a fair enough picture : a deep flush of 
anxiety was upon her cheeks, her blue eyes, under the 
shadow of her long lashes, were darkening with excite- 
ment and the thousand fluttering thoughts stirring in her 
Heart; and with that longing to look well in his eyes 
wln'ch had its spring in something far nobler than co- 
quetry, her dress was as graceful and picturesque as her 
simple but always tasteful toilette could afford. As she 
stood, the ring of hoofs rang upon the highway in the dis- 
tance; the color deepened in her cheeks, her whole fac« 


154 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


lighted up, her heart beat wildly against the wooden bar 
on which she rested. She was just opening the gate to 
run down the road to meet him, knowing how he would 
fling himself from the saddle at the first glimpse of her; 
she was lifting the latch, when the horse came nearer to 
her view; she saw it was not De Vigne, but Curly; not 
the one for whom her heart waited, but the one whom it 
rejected. With almost as much eagerness as De Yigne 
would have shown, he checked his horse at the little 
wicket before Alma could leave it, as she would fain have 
done. He threw himself off the saddle, and caught her 
hand : 

“Alma! for Heaven’s sake do not turn away from me.” 

She drew her hand impatiently away ; she held it as De 
Yigne’s — it was to be touched by no other. She was dis- 
appointed, too, and for the moment forgot anything else. 
Poor Curly, he came at an unlucky hour to plead his 
cause I 

“Alma, is your resolution folly taken ?” he said, catch- 
ing her little hands once more in his too tightly for her to 
extricate them. “ Listen to me but one word : I love you 
BO well, so dearly; it is not possible for any other to love 
you as I do. Can you not give me one hope? Can you 
not feel some pity ?” 

Again she drew her hands away more gently ; for her 
first irritation had passed, and she was too sweet a nature 
not to feel regret for the sorrow of which she was the 
cause. And a look of pain passed over her glad face as 
she answered him very softly : 

“ Why ask me? What I told you two days ago was the 
truth. I thank you very, very much for all your kindness. 
I wish to Heaven you cared nothing for me, for it grieves 
me to pain any one, but I could never have loved you ” 

“You would have done if you had not met him firf^t,” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


165 


flaid Brandling, his fierce jealousy of De Yigne waking up 
and breaking bounds. 

A brighter flush rose over her brow ; she lifted her head 
with a proud, eager gladness upon it; she misunderstood 
him, and fancied De Yigne had told his friend of their 
mutual love. 

“No,” she said, with her pride in Granville’s love sur- 
mounting her pity for Curlj^’s. “No ; if I had never known 
him I should have loved his ideal, of which he alone could 
have been the realization. You are mistaken; I could 
never have loved any other I” 

The speech had a strange combination of girlish fond- 
ness and impassioned tenderness; it was a speech to fall 
chill as ice upon the heart of her listener: he who loved 
her so well, and, as is so often the fate of true affection,, 
could win not one fond word in return. 

Curly’s hands grasped the rail of the gate ; his fair and 
delicate face looked aged ten years with the marks of 
weary pain upon it. 

“ He has told you, then ?” he said, abruptly. 

He meant of De Yigne’s marriage, she thought he 
meant of De Yigne’s love, and answered, with a deeper 
blush, — 

“ Yes I” 

“My God I and you will love him?” 

“While my life lasts I” 

She gloried in her adoration of De Yigne, and would 
no sooner have thought of evading acknowledgment of it 
than Chelonis or Eponina of evading exile or death. How 
woman-like she flung aside the love that would fain have 
crowned her with all honor, peace, and happiness, and 
chose, and would equally have chosen had she known her 
doom, the one that would cost her such bitter tears, such 
burning anguish I 


156 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Heaven help me, then — and you!” 

The two last words were too low for her to hear; but, 
touched by the suffering on his face, she stretched out the 
hands she had withdrawn. 

“Colonel Brandling, I am grieved myself to grieve you. 
Forget me ; you soon will find others much more worthy of 
you, and until you do at least forgive me 1” 

“Forgive you!” repeated Curly, “what would I not I 
but forget you I never can. I do not hope for that. Oh, 
Alma, my darling !” he cried, clasping her little hands close 
up to his heart, “would to Heaven you would listen to me. 
I would make you so happy : you will never be so happy 
with He Yigne. He does not love you unselfishly as I do; 
he will sacrifice you to himself ; if you would but listen to 
me, all that life can give shall be yours — my name, my home, 
higher rank than I hold now. I will win you everything 
you desire, and with time I will make you love me.” 

At first she had listened to him in vague stupefaction, the 
thought never entered her head that any man should dare 
to ask her to forsake De Yigne ; when she did comprehend 
his meaning she wrenched her hands away for the last time, 
her eyes flashing with anger, fiercer than any that had 
hitherto been roused in her young heart, passion of an- 
other sort crimsoning her brow. 

“Do you dare to insult me with such words? Do you 
venture to suppose that any living man could ever make 
me faithless to him? Girl as I am, I tell you that you 
speak most falsely if you say that he does not love me 
generously, nobly, and unselfishly, with a love of which I 
can never be worthy. You are a true friend indeed, to 
come and slander him in his absence; you would not dare 
to try and rival him with such coward words if he were 
present. He would have scorned to take such mean ad- 
vantage over youP’ 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


157 


Witb those vehement words, natural and right in her, 
but how bitter to him I Alma swept from him with a 
dignity of which those who only knew her in her gay and 
girlish moods would hardly have thought her capable, and 
turned in to her bay-windows, her face full of indignation 
at what she thought — ignorant of the fact that prompted 
poor Curly’s unwise words — such insult and such treachery 
to her idolized lover. His hands grasped the gate-bar till 
the rusty nails that were in the wood forced themselves 
through his gloves into the flesh, and watched her till the 
last gleam of her golden hair had vanished from his sight. 
Then he threw himself across his saddle, and galloped 
down the road amid the heavy rain that now began to 
fall from the gathering clouds, the ring of the hoofs grow- 
ing fainter on Alma’s ear as she listened for those that 
should grow nearer and nearer till they should bring De 
Yigne to her side. She had no thought for Curly; I 
think she would have had more if she had known that 
never again on earth would she look upon that fair, fond 
face, that would so soon lie turned upward to the pitiless 
sky, unconscious and calm amid the roar of musketry and 
the glare of a captured citadel. 

She threw herself down upon a couch, excited still with 
the glow of indignation that Curly’s words had roused in 
her. Impetuous always, though sweet tempered, she was 
like a little lioness at any imputation on De Yigne ; whether 
he had been right or wrong she would have flung herself 
headlong into his defense, and, had she seen any faults in 
her idol, she would have died before she let another breathe 
them. Scarcely had the gallop of Curly’s horse ceased to 
mingle with the fall of the rain-drops and the rustle of the 
chestnut-leaves, when the roll of carriage-wheels brok>* on 
her ear. She started up wild with delight — this time »h© 
VOL. II. 14 


158 


GRANVILLE DS VIGNE. 


felt sure it was he— and even Pauline screamed the name 
she had caught from Alma, “ Sir Folko I Sir Folko !” 

But the girl’s joyous heart fell with a dead weight upon 
it when she saw a hired brougham standing at her gate. 
She knew that if Be Yigne ever drove down, which was 
but seldom, as he at all times preferred being in saddle, he 
drove in one of his own carriages with his servants. Out 
of the brougham came a lady, tall, stately, superbly dressed, 
gathering her rich skirts round with one hand as she came 
up the gravel path. Alma watched her with irritation and 
no sort of interest; she did not know her, and she supposed 
she was some stranger called to look at her pictures — since 
her Louis Dix-sept had been exhibited at the Water-Colors 
she had had many such visitors. The lady turned, of course, 
to the side of the house to approach the hall door, and 
Alma lay quiet on her couch, stroking Pauline’s scarlet 
crest, while the bird reiterated its cry, “ Sir Folko I Sir 
Folko I” 

She rose and bowed as her visitor entered, and looked 
at her steadily with her upraised blue eyes — with a trick 
Alma had of studying every new physiognomy that came 
before her, forming her likes and dislikes thereupon; 
rapidly, indeed, but nevertheless almost always uner- 
ringly. The present survey displeased her, as her guest 
slightly bent her stately head. They were a strange con- 
trast, certainly. The woman tall, her figure very full, too 
%11 for beauty ; her features fine and sharp, with artistic 
yet deep-hued rouge upon her cheeks, and Oriental tinting 
round her bold black eyes ; her raven hair turned off a I’im- 
peratrice, — a repulsive, harsh, though undeniably handsome 
face, her attire splendid, her jewels glittering, yet with some 
indefinable want of the lady upon her : the girl small, slight, 
with native grace and aristocracy in all her movements; 
with the best of all loveliness, the beauty of intellect, ra- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


159 


finement, vivacity; with her light girlish diess, her general 
air of mingled childlikeness, intelligence, and fascination. 

Alma rolled a chair toward her, seated herself again, 
and looked a mute inquiry as to her visitor’s errand. The 
lady’s fierce, bold eyes were fixed upon her in curious 
scrutiny ; she seemed a woman of the world, yet she ap- 
peared at a loss how to explain her call ; she played with 
the fringe of her parasol as she said, “Have I the pleasure 
of seeing Miss Tressillian ?” 

Alma bent her head. 

She still toyed uneasily with the long fringe as she went 
on, never relaxing her gaze at Alma: 

“May I inquire, too, whether you are acquainted with 
Major He Yigne ?” 

At the abrupt mention of the name so dear to her, the 
blush that yesterday De Yigne had loved to call up by his 
whispered words rose in Alma’s face ; again she bowed in 
silence. 

“You are very intimate with him — much interested in 
him, are you not ?” 

Alma rose, her slight figure haughtily erect, her eyes 
sufficiently indicative of resentment at her visitor’s un- 
ceremonious intrusion : 

“Pardon me, madam, if 1 inquire by what title you ven- 
ture to intrude such questions upon me ?” 

“My title is clear enough,” answered her guest, with a 
certain sardonic smile, which did not escape Alma’s quick 
perception, and increased her distrust of her interrogator. 
“Perhaps you may guess it when I ask you but one more 
question : Are you aware that Major De Yigne is a mar- 
ried man ?” 

For a moment the cruel abruptness of the question sent 
back the blood with a deadly chill to Alma’s heart, and her 
companion’s bold, harsh eyes watched with infinite amuse- 


160 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


raeot the quiver of anguish that passed over her bright 
young face at the mere thought. Biit it was only for a 
moment; the next Alma smiled at the idea, as if Sir Folko 
would conceal anything from her — above all, conceal that! 
Her rapid instincts made her mistrust and dislike this 
woman ; she guessed it was some one who, having a grudge 
against De Vigne, had tried this clumsy method to injure 
him, and her clear., fearless eyes flashed contemptuous anger 
on her questioner; she deigned no answer to the inquiry. 

“Major De A^'igne is my friend. I allow no stranger to 
mention his name to me except with the respect it deserves. 

I am quite at a loss to conceive why you should trouble 
yourself to insult me with these unwarranted interroga- 
tions. You will excuse me if I say that I am much en- 
gaged just now, and should be glad to be left alone.” 

She bowed as she spoke, and moved across the room to 
the bell, but her visitor would not take the hint, however 
unmistakable ; she sat still, leaning back in her chair play- 
ing with her parasol, probably puzzled whether or no the 
Little Tressillian was aware of her lover’s marriage. 
High-couraged and thoroughly game as Alma was, she 
felt a repugnance to this woman — a certain vague fear of 
her, and dislike to being alone with her — and wished, how 
fervently, that Granville would but come. Unconscious of 
who was endeavoring to pour poison into Alma’s ear, he 
was leading his troop in sections of threes across Worm- 
wood Scrubbs; even while he gave the word of command, 
his heart beating high with the memory of the fond and 
earnest words of love that but a few hours before he had 
heard, and in so few hours more should hear again. 

Her visitor rose too, and took a different tone, fixing her 
black eyes, in whose bold stare spoke such a dark past 
and such an unscrupulous character, on those whose dark- 
blue depths shone clear with frankness, fearlessness, and 
youth 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


161 


“You take too high a tone, young girl; if you do not 
know of his marriage, you are to be pitied; if you do, you 
are to be blamed indeed ; and if you have any shadow of 
right feeling left in you, you will be bowed down with shame 
before mo, and will never, out of both regard for yourself 
and justice to me, see Granville De Yigne again, when I 
tell you that 1 am his wife 

“His wife 1” With ashy lips poor little Alma re-echoed 
the words, which came to her with but a vague significance, 
yet with a chill of horror. His wife ! — that coarse, cruel- 
eyed woman, with her bold stare, and her gorgeous dress, 
which yet could not give her the stamp of birth ; for Time 
had not passed wholly lightly on the Trefusis, and now 
that the carnation in her cheeks had ceased to be from na- 
ture, and her form, always Juno-like, had now grown far 
too full for symmetry, handsome as she still was, there was 
more trace of the FrestonhilPs milliner in her than of the 
varnish she had adopted from the Parisiennes, and at 
thirty-seven the Trefusis had grown — vulgar! That 
woman his wife ! Chill and horrible as the words had 
once sounded in her ear, Alma, true to her glowing faith 
in, and reverence of, De Vigne, could have laughed at the 
mere thought. That woman his wife 1 — his I when but a 
few hours before he had called her his love, his darling, his 
own little Alma, and kissed her, when she spoke to him of 
their sweet future together ! She knew it was a plot 
against him; she would not join in it by lending ear to it. 
Even had it been true, no lips but his should have told 
her; but it was not true — it could not be. He could never 
have loved that woman — splendid though she might have 
been in her early youth — with her rouged cheeks, her 
tinted eyelids, her cruel eyes, her cold, harsh voice, her 
style, which struck on the Little Tressillian’s senses as 

14 * 


162 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


something so wholly unlike the refinement, the intellect, 
the delicacy which seemed to please him now. Alma did 
not remember that a man’s first love is invariably the an- 
tipodes of his last ! 

“You his wifel’^ she repeated, with a contempt in tho 
curl of her lips which excited the savage nature of her 
listener, as the Trefusis’s words and tone had excited the 
slumbering fire of Alma’s character. “You his wife? 
Before pretending to such a title, you should first have 
learnt the semblance of a lady to uphold you in the as- 
sumption of your role. Your impertinence in addressing 
me I shall not honor by resenting ; but your ill-done plot, 
I must tell you, will scarcely pass current with me.” 

She spoke haughtily and impatiently, anger and disdain 
flashing from her expressive face, which never cared to 
attempt concealment of any thought passing through her 
mind. 

“Plot I” repeated the Trefusis, with a snarl on her lips 
like a hound catching hold of its prey, her savage temper 
working up, not warmly, as De Yigne’s and Alma’s passion 
did when roused, but coldly and cruelly. “You think it a 
plot, young lady ? or do you only say so to brazen it out 
before a woman you have foully wronged ? If it be a plot, 
what say you then to that ?” 

Not letting go her hold upon it, she held before Alma’s 
eyes the certificate of her marriage. 

“ Read it I” 

Alma, who had never seen a document of the kind, saw 
only a printed paper, and put it aside with a haughty ges- 
ture; she would have none of this woman’s enforced con- 
fidences. But the Trefusis caught her little delicate wrist 
in the hard grasp of the large hand that years before 
Sabretasche had noticed, and held the certificate sc that 
Alma could not choose but see the two names, Granville 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


163 


Oe Yigne and Constance Lucy Trefusis, with the prolix 
preamble with which his Grace of Canterbury so graciously 
permits an Englishman to wed. 

Alma’s face grew white, even to her lips ; her eyes black, 
as they were sure to do under strong excitement; for an 
instant her heart stopped with a dull throb of anguish and 
horror, then, true to her allegiance, refused, even in the 
face of proof, the doubt that would dishonor him; no 
thought that was treachery to her lover should dwell in 
her mind, no stranger should whisper of him in his absence 
to herl She threw off the Trefusis’s hand as though it 
had been the gripe of an adder’s fangs. 

“Leave my presence this instant,” she said, fiercely, her 
soft eyes flashing like dark-blue steel in the sunlight; “it is 
useless to seek to injure him with me.” 

As she spoke she rang the bell, and so loudly that the 
single servant of the house responded to the summons in- 
stantly ; Alma bowed her head with the stately grace of 
an empress signing to her household, “Show this lady to 
the door.” 

For once in her life the Trefusis was baffled ; she knew 
not how to play her next card, uncertain as to whether or 
no Alma was aware of her marriage to De Yigne, judging, 
of the two, that she was — for of a love as true, a faith as 
honorable as the Little Tressillian’s, she never could even 
have imagined. She had hoped to find a weak and timor- 
ous young girl, whom her dignity would awe and her story 
overwhelm, but she was baffled, cheated of her second re- 
venge upon De Yigne. She turned once more to Alma, 
with her devil’s sneer upon her fine bold features: 

“Excuse me. Miss Tressillian, for my very misplaced pity 
for you. I fancied you a young and orphaned girl, whom 
knowledge of the truth might warn from an evil course; I 
regret to find one on whom all warnings are thrown away, 


1C4 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and who gives insult where she should ask for pardon. No 
other motive than pity for you prompted my call. I liave 
been too often the victim of Major De Yigne’s inconstancy 
for it to have any longer power to wound me.” 

Then the woman, whom Church and Law would have 
termed his wife, swept from the room, and the girl, whom 
Love and Nature would have declared his wife, was left 
once more to her solitude. In that solitude poor little 
Alma’s high-strung nerves gave way ; while her sword and 
her shield were wanted she had done battle for him gal- 
lantly, but now they were no longer needed her courage 
forsook her, and she lay on the couch sobbing bitterly. 
Tears had always been very rare with her, but of late they 
had found their way much oftener to the eyes which should 
have been as shadowless as the deep Southern skies, whose 
hue they took ; with passion, all other floodgates of the 
heart are loosed. Her wild ecstasy of rapture was certain 
to have its reaction; vehement joys, too, often pay their 
own price — above all, with natures that feel both too 
keenly! She did not credit what the Trefusis had told 
her; her own quick perception, true in its deduction, 
though here not true in fact, knew that no really injured 
wife would have taken the tone of her visitor, nor so un- 
dignified a means of making her wrongs and her title 
known; there was something false, coarse, cruel in the 
Trefusis, which struck at once on her delicate ^senses; she 
felt sure it was a plot against him, the marriage certificate 
a forgery; she had read of women who had taken similar 
revenge upon men. “So many must have loved him,” 
thought poor little Alma, “and so’ many, therefore, will 
hate me as 1 should hate any one who took him away 
from me.” So she reasoned, with that loyal love which, 
truer than the love that is fabled as blind, if it see a stain 
on its idol will veil it from all eyes, even from its own 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


165 


She did not, for an instant, believe wnat the Trefusis had 
told her; she was sure her Sir Folko would never have 
concealed it from her — he would never have deceived her 
Still it had left upon her a sort of vague dull weight; she 
felt afraid, she scarcely knew of what, a terror lest her 
new- won joys should leave her as suddenly as they had 
come to her ; she longed for her lover to be with her 
once more, to feel him take her in his arms again, and 
hear him tell her he was all her own; her thirst for De 
Vigne’s presence became almost unbearable : she would 
have given years of her young life to look in his eyes 
again, and hear his voice whisper, as it had done the 
night before, those love-vows which had awoke all the 
slumbering passions of her nature. 

Once more the roll of carriage-wheels interrupted the 
ceaseless fall of the heavy rain. Alma started up; dash- 
ing the tears from her flushed cheeks, joy beaming again 
on her changing face, every sense strained to see if at last 
it was he. But that she would not welcome him with tears 
she could have wept with delight when she saw on the car- 
riage-box a man whom she knew to be his servant, his own 
valet Raymond, whom she remembered so well because he 
had brought her Pauline, and the flowers that had made 
De Yigne’s first gift; now she knew his master must be 
there ! 

Poor little Alma! She had suffered a good deal in her 
brief life, but she had never known anything like the terror 
which, crowding the pain of hours into a single minute, 
laid its leaden hand upon her when she saw not De Vigne, 
but his servant alone approach. 

“Oh my God! what has happened? lie is ill!” sho 
uttered, unconsciously, her nerves unstrung by her inter- 
view with the Trefusis; lier imagination seized on all the 
evils that could have befallen one whom she loved so well, 

2o 


166 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


thrtt she feared happiness with him was too much rapture 
to be given to her. 

Her face kept changing from a crimson flush to a lifeless 
white during the few moments while the man was going 
round to the entrance and being admitted. She stood 
with her hands clinched in the elfort to repress the emo- 
tion she could no^ show to him. As Raymond approached 
her, with the silken humility which characterized that prize 
valet, in contradistinction to the pomposity and grandeur 
affected by his class, he seemed, for that impassive indi- 
vidual, hurried and anxious. 

“ Madam,” he began, with one of the reverential salaams 
which would have qualified him to be groom of the cham- 
ber, “in riding home last evening. Major De Yigne was 
thrown from his horse.” 

“Good God I is he hurt?” 

Not the servant’s presence could restrain the agony 
spoken in those few brief words, or rather she had utterly 
forgotten his presence. 

“Yes he is,” said Raymond, hesitatingly. “The hurt 
might not perhaps be so severe, but inflammation, and 
consequently fever, have set in. He is, of course, unable 
to move. He is at times unconscious, and at those times 
he is constantly speaking of you. Miss Tressillian ; mut- 
tering your name, and calling you to come to him so in- 
cessantly, that the surgeon told me, if I knew who the 
lady was that the Major meant, to fetch her, for that his 
life depended on his being kept as calm as possible. So, 
madam, I ventured to come and inform you. I could not 
tell what to do. I hope I have done right. I brought 
the carriage in case you might be kind enough to 
come ” 

Poor little Alma! how the light died out of the face so 
radiant but a short time before ! She was white as a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


167 


Btatue, save for the blue veins which stood out upon her 
temples and her hands. She gave one low, deep sob, tears 
would not now come to her relief; then she turned her 
eyes with all their pitiable anguish upon the valet, and 
her throat was hoarse and dry as after a long illness, when 
she answered him incoherently ; 

“ Right — quite right. I shall be ready in a moment.’^ 

Alma’s love was infinitely too true, eager, and active, to 
stand still and weep while anything could be done for him. 
She never paused to reason or reflect; all she thought of 
was De Vigne suffering, perhaps in danger. He wanted 
her, that was enough I She ran up stairs, her heart suffo- 
cated with the sobs to which she would not give way while 
he needed nerve and action to aid him. She took her 
little black hat, threw a large cloak over her dress, and was 
beside the carriage in an instant. 

“ The Major was riding toward Windsor, madam, so he 
is now at the nearest house to the place where Berwick 
threw him. It is many miles from here,” said Raymond, 
as he opened the door. 

Alma bent her head; her thoughts were too fully cen- 
tered on De Yigne to notice that the man had said on his 
entrance that Granville was riding home, now that he had 
been going across to Windsor; or to remark the improba- 
bility of De Vigne’s having gone so far the previous night. 
The door was shut, Raymond got upon the box, and tho 
brougham rolled away, bearing Alma from St. Crucis. 

The drive seemed interminable through the heavy rain, 
which fell without cessation. Alma heeded neither roads 
nor weather; her heart was with her lover, chained on a 
bed of suffering, asking for her to soothe his pain, think- 
ing of her even when his mind had wandered from all else, 
with only hirelings around his bed to calm his suffering, to 
watch his fevered sleep, to hold the cool draught to his 


168 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE; 


burning lips, to push the hair off his heated brow, to do 
all that Alma in her great love longed and yearned to do 
for him, and would have done more fondly, more unflag- 
gingly, more tenderly, than any other. All her thoughts 
were with her lover, and every moment that kept her from 
him seemed an eternity. She could not remember how far 
Windsor was from Richmond ; she knew little or nothing 
of London or its environs, indeed of England itself, so 
secluded had her life been since she quitted Lorave; but 
the drive seemed interminable, in the heavy drenching rain 
that rattled on the carriage-top and poured off the windows. 
So horrible grew the long, dreary drive, through roads so 
strange to her, with her fear and anxiety for her lover, and 
the ceaseless sigh and sob of the drenching rain, that Alma, 
impressionable as. most enthusiastic natures are, became 
what she very rarely was, nervous and fearful, excited to a 
vague and heavy dread of some approaching evil. All 
her radiant joy of the morning had died away. Curly’s 
words, the Trefusis’s intrusion, the news of De Yigne’s 
accident, all combined together, had weighed upon her 
sensitive and excitable nature with a gloom and a dread 
that she could not shake off or reason away. That dreary, 
solitary drivel how long it seemed; how horrible the gray, 
dark rain, the ceaseless roll of the wheels, the wearisome, 
unfamiliar road I Poor little Alma, as if conscious of her 
doom, cowered down in a corner of the carriage, like a 
young child fearful of the dark, looking back on the sweet 
past of yesterday, as, beside the grave of one they have 
loved, men look back on the time when the dead lips were 
smiling and the closed eyes were bright. 

The carriage stopped at last on the outskirts of Wind- 
sor, rolled through iron scroll gates under some dripping 
larch-trees, through small grounds very ill kept and untidy, 
with long grass and llowers run wild, and a statue or twu 


GRANVILLE BE VIGNE. 


169 


moss-grown, grim, and broken; the very aspect of the 
place struck a fresh chill into Alma’s heart, and nothing 
in the house itself reassured her. It was a cross between 
an old country-house and a lorette’s or actress’s St. John’s- 
wood villa, and had an untidy, dissipated, unpleasant look 
about it — at least to her, long used to the brilliant sunlight 
of Lorave, and since accustomed to her old nurse’s bright, 
cleanly, and picturesque farm-house. It seemed a house 
that might have seen dark stories and painful scenes, 
smothered from the light of justice, between those irregular 
and dirty walls. The carriage stopped again before a low 
side-door, and Alma thought little of the house — only of 
the one who had sought its temporary asylum. She sprang 
from the brougham the instant Raymond let down the 
steps. 

“Where is your master?” 

“I will take you to him, madam, if you will have the 
kindness to follow me,” said that silky valet. 

Alma bent her head in acquiescence, and followed him 
through several crooked passages and tortuous corridors, 
through which she could not have found her way back 
unaided ; at last he threw open the door of a room, and 
stood back for her to enter. It was now nearly nine 
o’clock; the dense clouds and drenching rain had made it 
as dark in the open country as though it were fully night; 
and in this chamber, of which the curtains before the 
windows at the far end were drawn, Alma could see nothing 
save the indistinct outline of a table and some chairs near 
her. She turned hastily to Raymond : 

“ Is Major De Yigne ” 

But the valet had withdrawn, closing the door behind 
her, and she heard a sharp click like the turning of a key 
in a lock. Then a deadly agony of fear came upon her, 
and she trembled from head to foot; horrid sights, sounds, 

10 


VOL. H. 


no 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


thoughts, seemed to hover round her; she had had from 
infancy a strange, vague terror of being alone in darkness, 
and she stretched out her hands with a pitiful cry : 

“ Sir Folko — Granville — oh I where are you 

In answer to her call a man’s form drew near, indistinct 
in the less than demi-lumiere, and in her ear a man’s voice 
whispered: 

“My love, my beautiful, my idolized Alma, there is one 
here who loves you dearer than him you call. If I have 
erred in bringing you here, pardon at least a fault of too 
much love.” 

A shriek of loathing, despair, horror, and anguish burst 
from Alma’s lips, ringing shrill and loud through the 
da,rkeued room, as she knew the speaker to be Yane Cas- 
tleton. She struggled from his grasp so fiercely that he 
was forced to let her go, and mastering her terror with the 
courage that was planted side by side in her nature with 
so much that was poetic and susceptible, she turned on to 
him coldly and haughtily, as she had spoken to the Tre- 
fusis : 

“Lord Yane, what do you think to gain by daring to 
insult me thus ? Major De Yigne’s servant brought me 
here to see his master, who was dangerously hurt. I de- 
sire you to leave me, or, if this be your house, and you 
have one trace of a gentleman’s honor left in you, to tell 
me at once where I may find my friend.” 

Castleton would have laughed outright at the little 
fool’s simplicity, but he was willing to win her by gentle 
means if he could, perhaps, for there are few men entirely 
blunted and inured to shame; he scarcely relished the 
fiery scorn of those large blue eyes that flashed upon him 
in the twilight. 

“ Do not be so severe upon me,” he said, softly. “ Surely 
one so gentle to all others may pardon an offense boru 


QRANVILIi: DE VIGNE. 


ITl 

from a passion of which she of all others should show some 
pity. I w^ould have told you yesterday how madly I love 
you — and my love is no cold English fancy, Alma — I love 
yon, my beautiful, idolized, divine little angel ; and my love 
has driven me perhaps to error, but an error such as women 
should surely pardon.” 

“Do not touch me I” cried Alma, fiercely, as he stretched 
out his arm again toward the delicate form that he could 
crush in his grasp as a tiger’s fangs a young gazelle. 
“Your w^ords are odious to me, your love pollution, your 
presence hateful. Insult me no more, but answer me, yes 
or no, where is Major De Vigne 

“ De Yigne ? I do not know. He is with his wife ; he 
cannot hear you, and would not help you if he did.” 

“It is a lie!” moaned Alma, almost delirious with fear 
and passion. “ He has no wife; and if he cannot help me 
now he will revenge me before long for all your dastard 
insults.” 

“How will he hear of them, pretty one?” laughed Cas- 
tleton. “ Do you think, now I have you, I shall let you go 
again ? I have hardly caged my bird only to let her fly. 
We shall clip your wings, loveliest, till you like your cap- 
tivity too well to try and free yourself. You are mine 
now, Alma; you shall never be De Yigne’s.” 

“I shall never be yours — dastard I — coward!” gasped 
Alma, striking him with her clinched fingers. Involunta- 
rily he loosened his hold one moment; that moment was 
enough for her; she wrenched herself from him, flew across 
the room, tore aside the curtain of one of the windows; — 
by good fortune it was open, and, without heeding what 
height she might fall, leaped from its low sill on to the 
ground without. The window was five feet off the ground- 
lawn below, but, happily for her, there lay just where she 
alighted a large heap of cut grass — all that had been 


172 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


mown off the turf that morning having been gathered to- 
gether just beneath the window. Its yielding softness 
broke her fall, but she lay stunned for a moment, till Cas- 
tleton’s voice from the chamber made her spring to her 
feet, like a hare that has lain down panting to rest a mo- 
ment in its run for life, and starts off again, with every 
nerve quivering and every sense stretched, at the bay of the 
hounds in pursuit. She sprung to her feet, and ran with 
all the fleetness to which her terror of Castleton’s chase 
could urge her feet, along the lawn. The grounds were a 
labyrinth to her, the light was dim and dusky, the rain still 
fell in torrents, but Alma’s single thought was to get away 
from that horrible house to which she had been lured for 
such a horrible fate. She fled across the lawn, and through 
a grove of young firs, taking the first path that presented 
itself ; the road through the plantation led her on about a 
quarter of a mile ; she flew over the dank wet turf with the 
speed of a hunted antelope, yet to her, with the dread of 
pursuit upon her, thinking every moment she heard steps 
behind her, feeling every instant in imagination the grasp 
of her hated lover and foe, it seemed as though leaden 
weights were on her ankles, and each step she took seemed 
to take her a hundred steps backward. At the end of the 
plantation was a staken-bound fence, and a high gate, with 
spikes on its top rail. Her heart grew sick with terror: 
if she turned back she would fall into Castleton’s grasp as 
surely as a fox that doubles from a wall falls a victim to 
the pack. She knew he would pursue her ; to retrace her 
steps would be to meet him, and Alma knew him well 
enough to guess what mercy she would find at his hands. 
An old man, gathering up his tools after thinning the trees 
and loosening the earth round their roots, was near the 
gate, and to him Alma rushed : 

“Let me through ! let me through, for God’s sake I” she 


GIRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


1T3 


gasped, her fingers clinching on his arm, the wild terror on 
her face telling her story without words. 

The old peasant, a hard-featured, kiudly-eyed old man, 
looked at her in amazement. 

“Poor bonny child, where would you go?” 

“ Let me through quick — quick, for the love of Heaven !” 
whispered Alma, panting with her breathless race. 

Without another question the woodsman unlocked the 
gate and let her pass; she flew through it with a mur- 
mured “God reward you 1” and as he locked the padlock 
after her, and took up his axe and spade, he muttered to 
his own thoughts, “ Castleton would flay me alive if he 
could for that ; but I don’t care — she’s too bonnie a birdie 
for such an evil cage.” 

Once through the gate, she found herself where two 
cross-roads met ; ignorant which led back to London, she 
took the one on her right and ran on, every step she took 
plunging her into the heavy and sloppy mud left by the 
continuous rain in the afternoon, the thick drops of the 
shower, that still fell fast and heavily, falling on her golden 
hair and soaking through her muslin dress, for both her 
hat and cloak had fallen oflf in the struggle with Castleton ; 
her heart beating to suffocation, her delicate limbs, so un- 
used to all fatigue or exertion, already beginning to fail 
her, every nerve on the rack in the dread horror of pursuit, 
strained to tension to catch the sound she dreaded so in- 
tensely, that not a bough cracked in the wind or a rain- 
drop splashed in the puddles as she passed but she thought 
it was Castleton or his emissaries chasing her to carry her 
back to that horrible house. On and on she ran, her gold 
hair loosened and streaming behind her, heavy and dank 
with water, her thin boots soaked and clogged with the 
weight of the mud gathered fresh with every step, her 
strength failing her, and every sinew throbbing, cracking, 

15 * 


174 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


aching with that merciless race from wiiat was worse than 
death. At last she could run no longer ; with all her ter- 
ror to push her on, and all her spirit, which was ever much 
greater than her strength, Nature would do no more, and 
rebelled against the unnatural strain upon her powders. 
She could not run, but she walked on and on, at first 
rapidly, halting every now and then for breath, then toiling 
wearily, ready to sink down on the wet, cold earth, mur- 
muring every now and then De Yigne’s name, or whisper- 
ing a prayer to God. On she still went, she knew not 
where, only away, away, away forever from Vane Castle- 
ton. Poor little Alma, so tenderly nurtured, so delicately 
bred, sensitive as a hot-house flower, the child of art, of 
love, of refinement, with her high-wrought imagination, 
her delicate mould of form and thought, her child-like fear 
of solitude in darkness 1 She must have sulfered in that 
cruel flight more than we, with men’s strength and power 
of endurance and of self-defense, can ever guess. On and 
on she dragged her weary way, till the dusky haze of rain 
and fog deepened to the softer gray of night, and the 
storm ceased and the crescent moon came out over the 
grand old trees of Windsor Forest. She had toiled on till 
she had reached the outskirts of the royal park, and as 
the moonlight shivered on their gaunt boughs and played 
on their wet leaves, and the dark hollows of their massive 
trunks stood out in cavernous gloom, and the summer 
winds sighed and moaned through the dim forest glades, 
A lma stopped, powerless to stir again, and a deadly terror 
of something vague and unknown crept upon her, for, 
strong as her clear reason was with the daylight of intel- 
lect and science, her brain was strongly creative, her nerves 
exquisitely tender, her mind steeped in poetry, romance, 
and out-of-the-world lore even from her childhood, when 
she had believed in fairies because Shak.speare and Milton 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


IT5 

wrote of them. A deadly terror name upon her: a hun- 
dred wild stories that she would have laughed at at another 
hour rose in chaos before her mind, bewildered already 
with the horrors of the past day. She was afraid to be 
alone with that vast silent forest, those cold, solemn stars; 
she was afraid of the night, of the stillness, of the solitude ; 
she who but so fev*^ hours before had been gathered to De 
Tigne’s heart and sheltered in his arms, there, as she had 
thought, to find asylum all her life. She was afraid; a 
cold trembling seized her, she looked wildly up at those 
great sighing trees waving their gaunt arms and silver 
foliage in the moonlight; no sound in the hushed evening 
air but the hooting of an owl or the clash of the horns of 
fighting stags. One sob rose in her throat, De Vigne’s 
name rang through the quiet woodlands and up to the 
dark skies, then she fell forward almost insensible on the 
tangled moss, wet and cold with the rain of the past day, 
her long bright hair trailing on the grass, her fair white 
brow lying on the damp and dirty earth, her little hands 
clinched on the gnarled roots of a beech-tree that had 
stood in its place for centuries past, while race after race of 
immortals, with thought and brain, passion and suffering, 
had passed away unheeded to their graves. There she lay ; 
and as if in pity for this fair, fragile, human thing, the 
summer winds sighed softly over her, and touched her brow 
with soft caresses as they played among her wet and golden 
curls. She had no power to move, to stir even a limb; 
terror, fatigue, that horrible and breathless race, that ter^* 
rible run through the pitiless storm, had almost beaten 
all the young life out of her. Nature could do no more; 
the spirit could no longer bear up against the suffering of 
the body ; where she had fallen she lay, broken and worn 
out; if Castleton had been upon her she could not have 
risen or dragged herself one other step. She was but half 


176 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


conscious ; wild thoughts, vague horrors, shapes, and sights 
and sounds, indistinct with the unembodied terrors of 
night-dreams, danced at times before her closed eyes, and 
hovered on the borders of her brain ; still she lay there, 
powerless to move from the phantasms of her mind, equally 
powerless to repel them with her will. All volition was 
gone; terror and bodily fatigue had done their work, till 
the mind itself at last succumbed, outwearied, and a heavy, 
dreamless sleep stole on her, the sleep of nature utterly 
worn out. There she lay on the cold, dank moss, the dark 
brushwood waving over her, above her the silent vault of 
heaven, with its mysterious worlds revolving in their 
spheres, while the great boughs of the forest stirred with a 
mournful rhythm, and through their silent glades moved 
with melancholy sigh and measure, the spirit of the summei 
wind. 


PART THE TWENTY-FIRST. 

I. 


HOW LITTLE ALMA HOVERED BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. 

The summer morning dawned sweetly on the grand old 
trees that were shaking the dew off their glossy leaves, 
and lifting their boughs to the sunshine; the herds of 
deer rose from their fern couches, and trooped down to 
the pools for their morning drink; the subtle, delicious 
fragrance of the dawn rose up from the wet grass that 
sparkled in the light after the storm of the past day, and 
from the deep dells, and shadowy glades, and sunny knolls 
of the Royal Forest rose a soft morning hymn of joy. 
One of the rangers was going home to his cottage for 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


177 


breakfast, a white-haired old man,- who had lived in the 
stately woodlands till he loved them almost as men love 
their own ancestral homes, and knew every legend that 
had haunted those royal glades since the days when 
Edward of York led his brilliant hunting-train in the 
midsummer sheen, and the eighth Tudor listened for the 
cannon boom that told him his own fair wife and Thomas 
Wynnes false love was murdered. He was going to his 
home for breakfast, when he caught sight of something 
gleaming white among the brushwood on the outskirts of 
the forest, and drawing nearer, to his astonishment beheld 
Alma as she slept. He was going to awaken her some- 
what roughly, perhaps, but something in her attitude 
touched him, and as he stooped over her and marked the 
fine texture of the dress, soaked through with mud and 
rain, her delicate hands with their white skin and blue 
veins, her face, so pale, so youthful, so refined, with the 
circles under the eyes dark as the lashes resting on them, 
and the parted lips, through which every breath came with 
such feverish and painful effort, he shrank involuntarily 
from touching harsnly what seemed so fragile and so help- 
less. 

He stooped over her, perplexed and worried; he did not 
like to leave her; he did not like to move her. 

“Poor pretty child 1” he muttered, drawing her thick 
golden hair through his rough fingers, and feeling her 
hand, which burnt like fire. “Who’s sent her out to 
such a bed, I wonder? If she’s been lying out all night, 
she’s caught her death of cold. 1 should like to take her 
home, poor young thing; but what would the old woman 
say ?” 

Tile worthy man, being a trifle henpecked, paused at 
this view of the question ; his charity halting before tho 
Iread of another’s condemnation of it, as cliarity in tho 


178 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


great world shrinks and hides her head before the dread 
of the “que dira-t*on I” He wavered; he could not leave 
her there; he was afraid, poor fellow, to take her home, 
lest a hissing voice should condemn his folly, and a shrew’s 
vituperations reward him for his Samaritanism, He wavered 
still, while his dog, with the true instinct and ready kind- 
ness with which dumb animals so often shame their owners, 
began to lick those little burning hands with his great 
rough tongue, in honest well-meaning to do good and to 
offer what help lay in his power. 

As his master wavered, ashamed to leave, afraid to take 
her with him, a lady and two little girls, a governess and 
her pupils, walking before their breakfast, drew near, too. 
The keeper knew them, and looked up as they approached, 
for they were astonished as well as he at this girlish figure 
with the white dress and golden hair lying down on the 
dark dank moss. 

“Dear me, Reuben — dear me, what is this?” asked the 
governess, while the children’s eyes grew round and bright 
with wonder and pleasure at seeing something strange to 
tell when they reached home. 

“It’s a woman, ma’am,” responded the keeper, literally, 
while the lady drew near a little cautiously and a little 
frightened; for, though a good-hearted, gentle creature, 
she was a woman, and by no means exempt from the pecu- 
liar theories of her sex, and no lady, we know, will look at 
another, however in distress or want, unless she knoWs she 
is “proper” for her own pure eyes to rest upon. 

“It’s a woman,” went on Reuben, “or rather a girl, 
ma’am, for she’s only a bit of a thing. She looks like a 
lady, too, ma’am — leastways her face and her hands do — 
and her dress is like them bits of cobwebs that fine ladies 
wear, that are no good at all for wind and weather. If 
she’s been lying here all night, sure she’ll die of cold afore 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


179 


lon^, though it is summer, to be sure; but by the look on 
her, 1 fear she’s been out in all the rain last evening. She’s 
only asleep now, ma’am, though she do look like a corpse, 
and I aon’t know what to do with her, ma’am, for you see 
it ain’t a little thing for poor people like us to get an in- 
valid into our house for, maybe, two or three months, and 
a long doctor’s bill, and perhaps in the end nothing to pay 
it with ; and as for the work-house ” 

“Coulan’t we take her home with us? I am sure 
mamma would let us. Don’t you think we might. Miss 
Russell ?” asked the younger girl, a bright-faced child of 
ten or eleven. 

“ Hush, Cecy I Don’t be silly I How could we take 
a person home that we know nothing about? She 
can’t be a very nice person you are sure, Cecy, or she 
wouldn’t be out here all alone,” said her elder sister, 
reprovingly, who had already learnt her little lesson in 
the world’s back-reading of charity, and had already a 
special ..little jury of her own for haranguing and con- 
verting people according to the practices she saw around 
her. 

“Let me look at her, poor young creature. You were 
quite right, Cecy dear, to be kind to people, though you 
could never do such a thing without asking your mamma; 
and you should not be so quick to condemn others, Ara- 
bella; it is not doing as you would be done by, my love. 
Let me look at this poor young thing !” said the governess, 
her compassion getting the better of her prudence. She 
stooped over the figure that lay so motionless amid all 
their speculations upon her, turned her face gently toward 
the light, and, as the sun-rays fell upon it, cried out in 
bitter horror, “Alma! my poor little Alma! How can 
she have come here ?” And, to the children’s wonder, 
their governess sank on her knees by the girl, pushing 


180 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the damp hair off her forehead, kissing her pale cheek, 
and almost weeping over her in her astonishment and her 
sorrow. 

“Do you know her, ma’am?” asked the keeper. “Do 
you know her, Miss Russell ?” cried the children, in shrill 
chorus of surprise and curiosity. The poor lady could 
not answer them at first; she was speechless with be- 
wilderment to find her darling Alma lying here sleeping, 
with the damp earth for her pillow, out here under the 
morning skies, with nothing to shelter her from night dew 
or noontide sun, as lonely, as wretched, as homeless as the 
most abject outcast flying from his life and banned from 
every human habitation. 

“ Yes, Reuben — yes, my dears — I know her well, indeed, 
poor darling 1” she answered them at last, hurriedly and 
incoherently, and trembling with the sudden shock and 
her uncertainty how in the world to act. “She is Alma 
Tressillian — my dear little Alma. Heaven only knows 
now she can have come here I What can have happened 
to her — what can have driven her all this distance from 
her home ?” 

“Is this Miss Tressillian you used to tell us about?” 
asked Cecy, eagerly. 

“I thought all your pupils had been ladies, Miss 
Russell ?” asked Arabella, standing aloof, with a curl oa 
her lip. 

But Miss Russell for once heard nothing either of them 
said; she was trying to wake Alma from the slumber that, 
save for her labored breathings, seemed the very counter- 
feit of death. Whether she woke or not she could net 
tell; a heavy, struggling sigh heaved her chest; she tried 
to turn, but had no power; then her eyes unclosed, but 
there was no consciousness in them ; the lids dropped 
again immediately; a shiver as of icy cold ran through 
her; she lay still, motionless as the dead. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


181 


“What can we do with her?” cried poor Miss Eussell, 
half beside herself with grief for the girl, and powerless- 
ness to aid her, for in her own home she was but a de- 
pendent, and her employer, a rector, in the constant habit 
of dinning charity and its duties into the ears of his 
“flock,” would, she knew, resent even more than Reuben’s 
wift^ the introduction into his house of a person ill and in 
need who could not repay him with eclat for his Chris- 
tianity. “What shall we do?” cried the poor lady. “She 
will die, poor dear child, if she is half an hour longer with- 
out medical aid. Poor little darling, what can ever have 
brought her to this ” 

“I’ll take her to our house,” said Reuben, decided at 
last. “ Since you know her, ma’am, that’ll be everything 
to my missis.” 

“Do, do,” assented the governess, eagerly; she would 
have done anything for her darling Alma that anybody 
could have suggested, no matter how much to her own 
hibderance, but by nature she was nervous, timid, and un- 
decided. “Do, Reuben, take her at once, and pray move 
her tenderly. I must see the Miss Seymours home, but I 
shall be at your cottage as soon as you are. Take her up 
gently. My poor little darling 1” 

Reuben lifted the girl in his arms, those sturdy, rough 
arms, so little used to such a load, and laid the golden 
head with no harsh touch against his shoulder. They 
might have taken her where they would, Alma knew 
nothing of it. Miss Russell looked at her lingeringly a 
moment; she longed so much to go with her, but she 
dared not take her pupils to see a girl whom their 
reverend father “did not know.” She retraced her steps 
rapidly with Arabella and Cecy, and Reuben went onward 
with his burden. 

The governess was as good as her promise. Reuben’s 

VOL. II. 10 


182 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


wife, with no over good grace, had but just received her 
new charge, with much amazement and loud grumbling, 
till softened, despite herself, by that sad, unconscious face, 
when Miss Russell came, bringing her own linen for her 
best-loved pupil’s use, and helped her to lay Alma on the 
pouch, which was, if small and hard, scrupulously clean, 
bathe her burning temples with vinegar, bind up her long, 
damp hair, and then wait — wait, unable to do more, till 
medical aid should arrive. 

For six weeks Alma lay on that bed, unable to move 
hand or foot, unconscious to everything surrounding her, 
life only kept in her by the untiring efforts and master’s 
skill of a brain that put out all its powers to save her, and 
fought her battle with Death in her defense, unwearied in 
her cause, though he knew she was young and friendless, 
and that no payment, save the human life saved, might 
reward him; while the priest only sighed out his fears 
that she was not “prepared,” and excused himself from 
all office of his much-boasted Christain charity “on the 
score of his carrying the infection to his children” — the 
infection of brain fever I If De Yigne had watched over 
her through those long weeks when her life hung but on a 
thread, I think it would have driven him mad ; it struck 
to the hearts of all who saw her, to watch her as she lay 
there, her wide, fair brow knit with pain, her beautiful blue 
eyes wide open, without sense or thought, only a dull burn- 
ing glare in her aching eyeballs, her cheeks flushed deeply 
and dangerously, her long golden hair wet with the ice laid 
on her temples — her mind gone, not in raving or chatter- 
ing delirium, but into a strange, dull, voiceless unconscious- 
ness, in which the only tie that linked her to life and reason 
was that one name which now and then she murmured faint 
and low, “Sir Folko ! Granville I” 

The night out in the forest brought on inflammation of 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


183 


the lungs ; the shock, the horror, the agitation of her mind, 
fever; and against the two only her own young life and the 
skill that grappled for her with the death that hovered 
round her couch alone enabled her to battle. At last 
youth and science conquered; at last the bent brow grew 
calm, the crimson flush paled upon her face, her long, black 
lashes drooped wearily upon her cheek, her breathing grew 
more even, her voice ceased to murmur that piteous wail, 
“Sir Folko 1 Granville !” and she slept. 

“ She will live now,” said her doctor, watching that calm 
and all-healing sleep. 

“Thank God I” murmured her old governess, with tears 
of joy. 

“Who is that man whose name she mutters so con- 
stantly ?” asked Montressor, the medical man, outside her 
door, while Alma slept on as she had slept for fifteen 
hours, and did sleep on for another five. 

Miss Russell was somewhat embarrassed to reply ; her 
calm and prudent nature had puzzled in vain over Alma’s 
strange, expansive attachment, half childish in its frank- 
ness, but so wildly passionate in its strength. 

“Really I can hardly tell, I fancy — I believe — she 
means a gentleman, a friend of Mr. Tressillian’s, of whom 
I know she was very fond.” 

Montressor smiled. 

“ Can we find him ? He should be within call ; for if she 
has wanted him so much in unconsciousness, she had better 
not be excited by asking for him in vain when she awakes. 
What is he ?” 

“An officer in the army — in the Cavalry, I believe,” 
answered the governess, much more inclined to keep Do 
Vigne away than to bring him there. 

“A soldier? Oh, we can soon learn his whereabouts, 
then What is his name, do you know ?” 


184 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Major De Yigne,” said Miss Ilussell, reluctantly, for 
if there was anybody that mild and temperate woman dis- 
liked on earth, it was the person whom she termed that 
“ fascinating and very dangerous man,” at whose feet she 
had once found Alma sitting so fondly. Montressor put 
the name in his note-book. Two days after he called ou 
Miss Russell. 

“I wrote to the Horse Guards for Major De Yigne's 
address. They tell me he is gone to the Crimea. Tire- 
some fellow I he would have been my best tonic.” 

The doctor might well say so, for when at length she 
a ^oke from the lengthened sleep that had given her back 
to life, enfeebled as she was — so much so that for many 
days she lay as motionless, though not as unconscious as 
before — taking passively all the nourishment they brought 
her, the first words she spoke in her broken voice, which 
scarcely stirred the air, were : 

“Where is he? Can’t you bring him here? Pray do; 
he will come if you tell him I am ill. He will come to 
his poor little Alma. Go and find him. Pray go 1” 

And little as Miss Russell could sympathize or compre- 
hend this to her strange and somewhat reprehensible at- 
tachment for a man who, as she thought, had never said a 
word of affection in return ; who certainly had never offered 
to make Alma his wife — the only act on a man’s part that 
could possibly justify a woman in liking him, according to 
that prudent and tranquil lady’s theory — she was too really 
fond of Alma not to grieve sorely to have no answer with 
which to relieve that ceaseless and plaintive question, 
“Why does he not come ? Why don’t you send for him ?” 
till Miss Russell, far from quick at a subterfuge, and loath- 
ing a falsehood, was obliged to have recourse to an eva- 
sion, after much difficulty in searching her mind for an 
excuse : 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


185 


“My dear child, if you excite yourself you will brin^ on 
your illness again, and you may never see your friend again. 
You must not see Major De Yigne yet, for your own sake; 
besides, remember, your fever is infectious; you would not 
bring him into danger, surely ? When all is safe for you 
and him we will try how we can bring him here.” 

Alma gave a deep, heavy sigh; all the returning light 
died out of her eyes. 

“Ah, I shall never get well without him; but I cannot 
think how I came here, I cannot remember. Let him know 
how I am ; pray do, but tell him I love him better than 
myself, and I will not see him if there is danger for him; 
only, only, I wonder he did not come to me, — I would have 
gone to him !” 

And poor little Alma, too weak to rebel, too exhausted 
still for her memory to recall anything of the past, except 
what she had remembered even in delirium, De Yigne and 
her love for him, burst into tears, and lay with her face to 
the wall, weeping low, heart-broken sobs that went to the 
heart of those that heard them. 

“She will never get well like this,” said Montressor, in 
despair at seeing his victory of science over death being 
undone again as fast as it could. “Who is this Major De 
Yigne? Deuce take the man, why did he go away just 
when one wanted him the most? Was Miss Tressillian 
engaged to him ?” 

“Not that I ever heard,” replied Miss Russell, sorely 
troubled with the subject. “But, you see, Mr. Montressor, 
she has very strong affections, and she has led a strange, 
solitary life, and Major De Yigne was her grandpapa’s 
friend, and has been very kind to her since she came to 
England, but — you know — it would hardly be correct, il 

he we?'e in England, for him to come here- ” 

16 * 


186 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


‘'Correct!” repeated Montressor, with a smile that the 
man of the world could not for the life of him repress at 
the good governess’s prudery, “we medical men, ray dear 
lady, have no time to stop for conventionalities when life is 
in the balance; when we have to deal so much wuth reali* 
lies, we learn to put that sort of scruple at its right value. 
If Major De Yigne were anywhere in this country I would 
make him come and quiet my patient by a sight of him, as 
none of my opiates will do her without. She will never 
get well like this; her body is stronger, but she has sunk 
into a most dangerous lethargy ; all she does is to sob 
quietly, and murmur that man’s name to herself, and if we 
cannot get at the mind we cannot work miracles with the 
body; that confounded brain and nervous system working 
together are our worst enemies to deal with, for there are 
no medicines that will reach them. She will never get 
w^ell like this; we must rouse her in some way; any shock 
would be better than this dreamy lethargy; there is no 
knowing to what mischief it may not lead. I shall tell 
her he is gone to the Crimea.” 

“ Oh, Mr. Montressor ! pray don’t !” cried the governess, 
tender-hearted even to what she considered as so reprehen- 
sible an attachment. “Pray don’t; I assure you it will 
kill her !” 

“She is much more likely to be killed if left as she is 
now,” answered Montressor. “I shall tell her he is gone 
to the Crimea, and that she must get well to go after 
him.” 

Miss Russell’s face of horror at the suggestion made him 
laugh, in spite of courtesy. “ I shall,” repeated the doc- 
tor; “anything that will rouse her I shall say; if my pa- 
tients have a fancy to go to the moon I humor them, if 
humoring the fancy any way tends to their recovery.” 

“ Who do you wish so much to see?” asked Montressor, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


187 


gently, when he visited Alma on the morrow and found 
her lying in the same despondent attitude, no color in her 
pale cheeks, 'no light in her sunk eyes. 

Alma’s mind was not yet wholly awake, but dim memo- 
ries of what had passed, and what had brought her there, 
only hovered through her brain, entangled even yet inex- 
tricably with the phantasma of delirium. All she waa 
fully awake to, and vividly conscious of, was the longing 
for De Vigne : so strong was that upon her that she started 
up in her bed when Montressor asked the question, her 
eyes getting back some of their old luminous light, and the 
first faint rose tint of color on her face. 

“Sir Folko — Granville — Major De Yigne, my only 
friend ! I am sure they have not told him I am ill, or he 
would have come. If I could see my old nurse she would tell 
him — where is she, too ? it is so strange — so very strange. 
Will you tell him? do, pray do, I shall never get well till 
I can see him !” And Alma sank back upon her pillows 
with a heavy, weary sigh. 

Montressor put his hand upon her pulse and kept it 
there. lie saw that her mind was very nearly unhinging 
again, and since it was out of his power to get De Yigne 
here, he was obliged to try some other way to rouse her. 

“ Do you love this friend of yours so much, then ?” he 
asked her, gently still. 

Alma looked at him a moment; then her eyes drooped, 
the faint blush wavered in her cheek, her mind was dawn- 
ing, and with it dawned the recognition of Montressor as a 
stranger, and that reluctance to speak of De Yigne to others 
which was so blended with her demonstrative frankness to 
him. She answered him more calmly, though with a sim- 
plicity and fervor which touched Montressor more than 
anything else ^^ould have done, for the unmasked human 
nature which his profession had often shown hin^ had made 


188 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


him naturally and justly skeptical of many of tbe displays 
of feelings that he saw. 

“Yes,” said Alma, lifting her eyes to his face. “Yes, 
he is all I have on earth ! and he will come to me — he 
will, indeed — if you will only let him know. I cannot 
think why he is not here. I wish I could remember ” 

She pressed her hands to her forehead — the history of 
the two days began to come to her, but still slowly and 
confusedly. 

“Keep quiet, and you will remember everything in time,” 
said Montressor. 

Alma shook her head with a faint sign of dissent. “Not 
if you keep him away from me — it is a plot, I know it is a 
plot. Why am I to lie here and never see him ? It is 
cruel. I cannot think why you all try to keep him 
away ” 

She was getting excited again; two feverish spots 
burned in her cheeks, and her eyes glowed dark and 
angry. 

“No one is trying to keep him away,” said Montressor, 
gravely and slowly. “ If it rested with us you should see 
him this instant — who should plot against you, poor child ? 
But your friend is a soldier, and soldiers cannot always be 
where they would. There is a war, you know, between 
England and Russia, and Major de Vigne has been sent 
off with his troop to the Crimea.” 

He spoke purposely in few and simple words, not to 
confuse her with lengthened sentences or verbose prepa- 
ration. As he thought, it took electrical effect. Alma 
sprang up in her bed, and seized his wrist in both her 
hands. 

“Gone — gone— away from me! Do you mean it? Is 
it true ?” 

Montressor looked at her kindly and steadily : 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


189 


^ “Quite true; it was his duty as a soldier. You must 
try and get well to welcome him back.” 

“Gone! — gone I Oh, my God ! And to war I Gone I 
and he never came for one farewell ; he never came to see 
his poor little Alma once again. Gone to the Crimea, and 
I may never see him, never hear his voice, never look at his 
face again I He may be ill, and I shall not be there; he 
may die, and I shall not know it; he may lie in his grave, 
and I shall not be with him! Gone! — gone! it is not 
true — it cannot be true ; he would never go without one 
word to his little Alma. If it he true, let me go to him — I 
am quite well, quite able ; God will give me strength, and 
I love him too much for death to have any power over me 
till I have seen him once again.” 

In her wild, excited agony she would have sprung from 
her couch, had not Montressor held her down in his firm 
grasp, and spoken to her in a calm and resolute tone 
which gave him wonderful sway over his patients. 

“Lie still, and listen to me. It is true Major de Yigne 
is gone to the Crimea; probably he was ordered off, as 
officers often are, on a moment’s notice. He may have 
sent to you, he may have gone to take leave of you, but 
that would have been at your home, he could not tell that 
you were here. If you wish to see him again — if you wish, 
as you say, to follow him to the Crimea — you must calm 
yourself, and do your best to recover. This excitement is 
the worst possible thing for your health, and unless you try 
to tranquilize your mind you will never be well either to 
find your friend or to make any inquiries about him. If 
you do care for him, you must do what I am sure he 
would wish you — your utmost to be quiet and get well 
again.” 

She listened to him with more comprehension in her 
large, sad eyes than had been in them since Montressor 


190 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


first saw her. “Thank you, thank you; you are very 
kind 1” But then her head drooped on her hands, a pas- 
sion of tears convulsed her frame, she sobbed with all the 
vehemence and abandon of her nature. “ Gone ! — gone I 
Oh, life of my life, why did you leave me?” 

But Montressor did not mind those tears — there were 
vitality, passion, reality, and strength in them ; they were 
wholly unlike those pitiful, broken, half-unconscious wail- 
ings, and would, he knew, relieve her surcharged brain. 
He left her to go his rounds, and when she was alone after 
her first passionate hours of grief, witli this shock all the 
past, link on link, came slowly and bewilderingly to Alma’s 
mind. For the first time since she had been placed, seven 
weeks before, on that bed in the ranger’s cottage, did she 
remember that horrible race in the midsummer storm, the 
terrors of that night in Windsor Forest, which had ended 
in bringing her thither. The Trefusis’s visit, Raymond’s 
trap, Castleton’s loathed love, the scene in that hateful 
house, came back upon her memory, and De Vigne had 
doubtless heard of that flight with Castleton, and, accredit- 
ing evil of her, had given her up and gone to the Crimea. 
She could have shrieked aloud in her agony to have lost 
him thus — to have him, without whom existence was value- 
less, gone into danger and death through her; to know 
that he, from whom her affection had never wandered since 
the time when, a little child, she had told him “Alma vi 
ama” in the library at old Weive Hurst, and from whom it 
never would wander, though she were never to see his face 
again, that he should be left to think she could forsake 
him, and gone where she could not fly to him to say, “ I 
am yours alone, in life and death!” Surely he must have 
known that, with such words as they had spoken — with 
such a parting as theirs had been — she could not have fled 
with another? — he could not believe that all the love she 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. I9l 

had shown him was a lie ? — he could not let her go on 
such cruel evidence ? She would not have believed against 
him; she had not credited the Trefusis’s story; she had 
felt that it was a link in Castleton’s plot — the woman but 
an emissary of his. De Yigne should have had the same 
faith in her; Sir Folko should never have left her, his 
own poor little Alma! 

As she thought and thought, Alma grew almost mad- 
dened; to lose him just when their hearts were knit in 
one, just when the heaven of love was dawning before 
their eyes; to lose him to danger and to death! — she 
thought her brain w'ould go; with the wild despair, the 
desperate, fierce longing to see him, be with him, hear his 
voice in her ear, feel his arms round her, telling her she 
was his own, and that none could make him doubt her. 
There was but one thing kept her up, one thought that 
forced her to calm herself, that one on which Montressor 
had relied: that to write to him — still more, to go to him, 
to learn anything of him, to dispel in any way this hideous 
barrier that had risen np between, as a horrible nightmare 
fills up the space between the golden evening and the 
laughing morn — she must get well. In Alma, with all 
her impetuousness and passion, childlike gayety and reck- 
less impulsiveness, there was much strong volition, much 
earnest and concentrated fixity of will and purpose ; she 
had not a grain of patience, but she had a great deal of 
perseverance, insomuch as she grew sick to death of wait- 
ing for a thing, but would work on for it with a strength 
and resolute vehemence that generally brought her her 
object in the end. If she was wanting to make an out- 
of-door sketch, and the sky was unpropitious, she was 
feverish with impatience till it cleared, and would not wait 
a moment for better weather; but if the sketch depended 
on her own skill, she was untiring in doing it over and 


;92 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


over again till she had conquered all its difficulties and 
accomplished her own end. So now, having set heart and 
mind on getting well, she did her utmost to keep herself 
from that feverish anguished sorrow, and to still that thirst 
for his presence, which she knew would only keep her 
farther from him; and though the bitterness of grief eat 
into her heart with suffering proportionate to her pas- 
sionate joy in those brief hours she had known of love in 
its deep and mutual ecstasy, Alma had hope and resolu- 
tion to recover, and strength came to her day by day. 

Reuben’s close cottage was not one to facilitate her 
restoration : light, air, comforts, atmosphere, all that were 
most needed for her, were inaccessible there. She had 
barely strength enough to be lifted from her bed without 
fainting, and Montressor saw that without the freedom of 
air, the space, the delicate entourages to which she was 
accustomed, she would never be better. He was in- 
terested in her; her simplicity and fervor in speaking of 
De Vigne attracted a man who knew life too well not to 
know the real from the spurious in such things ; he had 
been but a year or so married to a wife whom he loved 
tenderly, and perhaps her youth made him compassionate 
on Alma’s, and her affection made him believe in the pa- 
tient’s affection for De Yigne, as he might not otherwise 
have been so ready to do. Miss Russell had faintly hoped 
that her patrons, considering that they were invariably 
talking very largely of their charities, might have taken 
compassion upon her poor little pupil, and since the infec- 
tiousness of brain fever was of course but an excuse, might 
have offered her, when she was able to be moved, one of 
the many rooms of their large and stately rectory. But 
the rector — and I must say it is somewhat a peculiarity of 
the Church — did not much admire being expected to act 
up to his own sermons, (what man, lay or clerical, by the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


19S 


way, ever does ?) and if he had been at the Pool of Bethsaida 
would have turned up his aristocratic hooked nose at the 
dingy beggars, and would never have helped one of them 
in, unless, indeed, one of them had been a paralytic old 
Pharisee, whose horn was very high indeed, and who would 
have proclaimed from the house-top the good deed w^hich 
our saints, though they profess not to let their left hand 
know it, are sorely uneasy unless their neighbors through- 
out Jerusalem are fully aware of and duly accredit. 

Miss Russell’s rector, like many another rector, since 
lie “knew nothing of the young person,” would not have 
thought of wasting one of his spare beds on a girl “of no 
connections,” and “you know, my dear, for anything we 
can tell, perhaps of no very purely moral character,” as 
he remarked to his wife, previous to rushing into church 
in his stiff and majestic surplice, and giving for his text 
the story of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Ah me I 
we cry out to our neighbors about their purely moral 
characters till we entirely forget that charity covereth 
{i.e. throweth a veil over, as a man who does preach in 
his pulpit, but does act his own words out I really believe 
to the best of his sight and his strength, translated it to 
me once) a multitude of sins. Montressor was not counted 
a good man by his rector; indeed, having certain latitudi- 
narian opinions of his own, consequent on his study of man 
and of nature, and not always keeping them to himself as 
privately as prudence and his practice might have sug- 
gested, was somewhat of a thorn in the rector’s side, 
especially as in argument Montressor inevitably floored 
him with extreme humiliation, and the rector being once 
driven to define Grace by him was compelled to the ex- 
tremely uncomfortable and illogical answer, for which he 
would have scolded his wife’s youngest Sunday scholar, 
‘‘Well, dear me; — why, sir, grace is grace !” Montressor, 

17 


VOL. II. 


1 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


DiorcuV’er, did not always go to church, but quite au con^ 
trail e, and preferred strolling under the solemn aisles of 
W’lndrfor Forest, and thinking of that great God of Nature 
whom men lower in their sermons and exclude from their 
lives. Montressor, as you will perceive, was not a good 
man — most dangerous infidel and latitudinarian fellow 
altogether; and there were two people of whose ultimate 
damnation the rector was quite comfortably secure ; they 
were Monti essor and his wife. Therefore, too, you see it 
was very natural for poor Miss Russell to look to the 
rector, and not to Montressor, for charity; but — and I 
fancy that is as natural too — it was in him and not in the 
rector that she found it. Montressor knew that a week 
or two in a house like his might secure Alma's restoration, 
while she might linger on and on for an indefinite time in 
the oppressive atmosphere of Reuben’s cottage, close and 
dark as all such tenements are, with an odor in them pain- 
ful to olfactory nerves unaccustomed to it. As soon as 
she was able to be moved, Alma, too weak to protest 
against his will, was carried to his house ; and whether it 
was the light and air of her bed-room there, with the soft 
September air blowing in, full of the fragrance of the 
garden flowers, which had imperceptible eflect upon her 
health, or whether because having moved from the cottage 
where she had suffered so much seemed really a step nearer 
I)e Vigne, since it was a step nearer her recovery, Alma — . 
the elasticity and vigor of youth being strong in her — did 
daily grow stronger and better, and now began to recover 
as rapidly as she had been slow to do so before. Her 
gratitude, too, to Montressor spurred her on, for Alma 
was touched by the slightest kindness, and was of too 
grateful a nature, however absorbed in her own sorrow, 
not to rouse herself to appreciate and thank them for the 
care and the generous kindness both he and his wife 
lavished upon her 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


.95 


Mrs. Montressor, with all a girl’s love of romance, had 
taken a deep and wonderful interest in her husband’s pa- 
tient when she heard of her mysterious discovery in the 
forest, and her attachment for this officer, whose memory 
was the sole thing that remained on her mind during her 
unconsciousness, and whose name was first upon her lips 
on her awakening. She received her in her house with 
delight, bid her cook taake every dish she could imagine to 
tempt her, indeed would have killed his patient speedily 
with her delicacies if Montressor had not prevented her, 
and felt a not unpardonable curiosity to know her story, 
and how she came there that midsummer night. This 
Alma, as soon as she was able, told her, having no reason 
not to do so, and full still of a horrible dread and terror 
for fear Vane Castleton should ever find her out again. 
She spoke very little of De Vigne ; his name was too dear 
to her to bring it forward more than she could help, but 
all the rest she told frankly and fully, as was due, to her 
new-found friends; and Mrs. Montressor, with much hot 
vituperation upon Castleton, whom she regarded as a 
brute and ogre who deserved the fiercest chastisement — a 
feeling in which I think most of us can sympathize — told 
the story to her husband over their dinner-table. 

As soon as ever she could gather her thoughts, and had 
strength enough to write, Alma’s first effort was to pen to 
De Vigne the whole detail of Castleton’s plot, pouring out 
to him her grief, her longing to be with him, her prayers to 
De allowed to hear from him if not to go to him, her an- 
guish at the idea of his danger, all she had suffered, 
thought, and felt, all the maddening despair with which 
she had awoke from her illness to find him gone and her- 
self forsaken, upbraiding him for having credited such 
faithlessness and sin of his own little Alma, — pouring out 
to nim, in a word, all her passionate love and sorrow, as 


196 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Alma, to whom feeling usually gave, rather than checked, 
eloquence, like the improvisatrice of her half- country, had 
always poured out to him her wildest imaginings, her 
deepest feelings. When that was done — and, weak as she 
was, it was some days before she could write to him as she 
would — Alma sank back on her pillows with a weary sigh, 
and more bitter tears than even she, checkered as her short 
life had been, had hitherto ever shed. Many weary weeks 
must come and pass away, many weary days must dawn, 
and many nights must fall, before she could have an an- 
swer; and even now, before that reached him, what evil 
might not have befallen him I and from the phantasma of 
her fears Alma turned, sick and faint, away, yearning — as 
the bird, whose pinions are tiring in its long flight across 
the desert, yearns for the sweet ripple of the water-springs 
and the perfumes of the citron groves — to be gathered in 
his arms once more, and hear his love-words whispered in 
her ear. 

The letter was directed to “ Major De Yigne, British • 
Army, Crimea,” and Montressor himself posted it. As he 
told her so, the deep flush upon her cheeks and the fervor 
of her thanks for so trifling an action showed him how 
near her heart its speedy voyage lay. 

“Would it cost much money to go to the Crimea?” she 
asked him, as he paid her his visit that evening, fixing her 
dark-blue eyes on his with that earnest and brilliant regard 
which, when she had fixed her heart on any request, usually 
W'on it for her from all men. 

“A great deal, my little lady,” answered Montressor, 
gently. Though he might be a skeptic, he never sneered 
at his wife’s or Alma’s wildest thoughts; perhaps because 
he liked the enthusiastic romance which spoke of youth 
and unworn hearts; probably because he felt and acknowl- 
edged that in both it was real, with no taint of exaggera- 
tion or afifectatiou. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


197 


“How much?” asked Alma, wistfully. 

“A hundred or two, at the least.” 

Her lips quivered, and her head drooped with a heavy 
sigh. 

“Ah I and I have nothing I But, Mr. Montressor, are 
there not nurses with the army ? Have I not heard that 
ladies sometimes go to be in the hospitals ? Could not I 
go out to him in that way ?” 

Montressor smiled, amused yet touched. 

“ Poor child I you are much fit for a nurse I What do 
you know of wounds, of sickness, of death ? What quali- 
fication have you to induce them to give you such an 
office ? Do you think they would take such a fair little 
face as yours among the sick-wards? No, no; that is 
impracticable. You must wait: the lesson hardest of all 
to learn — one, I dare say, you have never had to learn at 
all.” 

It was true she never had, and it was one she never 
would learn all her life long; she might be chained down, 
but she would never grow to wait with patience ; she would 
fret her life out like a fettered nightingale, but she would 
never endure confinement calmly like a cage bird. She 
had a wild longing to go to the Crimea; not only would 
she have gone thither had she been rich, but had she but 
known of any means she would have worked her way there 
at any cost or any pain, only to be near him in his danger, 
and to hear him say that for all the witness against her he 
knew that she was his and his alone. But Alma, poor, 
unaided, unbacked, utterly ignorant of the forms, the ex- 
penses, the necessities of traveling, wholly unfit, with all 
her spirit and dauntlessness, for the role of an “ unprotected 
young lady,” Alma had to bow before that curse, under 
which much that is strongest, noblest, and best in Genius, 
Talent, and Love has gone down, never to be able to 

17 * ^ 


/98 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


shake off the cruel chain upon their wings, the curse of— 
want of money ! She had no money, poor child ; barely 
enough, not nearly enough without Miss RusselPs aid, to 
defray all that she owed to Montressor, to her nurse, to 
lleuben ; how was she, without money, to traverse those 
weary miles that stretched between her and her lover, 
across which no cry of hers could reach, no love of hers 
could shield him ? In those days it was only her passion- 
ate devotion to De Yigne, and her own determinate will to 
keep her brain calm and regain health, if she could, to go 
to him, or find him again by some means, which alone bore 
her up under the agony she suffered. 

Of course she was desirous to leave Montressor’s house 
as soon as she was able, and, warmly as they pressed her 
to stay, she fixed the earliest day she could bear the drive 
for her return to St. Crucis. She had not waited till her 
return to know when and how De Yigne had heard of her 
flight with Castleton ; what he had said when, for the first 
time in all his visits there, he had found her absent — ab- 
sent, too, the day after the very night on which she had 
sworn to him such unswerving love. Old Mrs. Lee wrote 
her word, as calm lookers-on often do write of the fiercest 
passions and bitterest sorrows that pass unseen before their 
very eyes, “The Major called, ray darling child, and I 
telled him all as I thought it to be, but as, thank Almighty 
God, it wasn^t. He took it uncommon quiet like, and 
walked out, and I baven^t seen not nothing of him since. 

How deep into Alma’s heart went those few common 
words “uncommon quiet like, and then walked out I” 
What volumes they spoke to her of that mighty anguish 
of passion, as still and iron-bound as the ice mountains of 
the Arctic, as certain to burst and break away, bringing 
death and destruction in its fall ! More still for the sufi'er- 
”ig she had caused him than for that which had fallen 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


199 


opon herself, did poor little Alma mourn for the impetuous 
impulse which had flung her so unconscious an assistant 
into Castleton’s plot. “If he die I shall have mur- 
dered him I Oh I my God, shield him and bring him back 
to me, or let me go to him I” that was the one cry, the one 
prayer that went up from her heart every hour, nay, every 
moment, for if her lips spoke other words her thoughts 
never wavered from De Vigne. 

The day was fixed for her to leave Windsor for St. Cru- 
cis. Montressor and his wife were both unwilling to part 
with her; for her story, her winning face, her strange, pas- 
sionate love, of which she so seldom spoke, but which was 
the very life of her life and soul of her soul, had all won 
them to her. Alma had a strange fascination for every- 
body; there was a peculiar, nameless charm in her dark- 
blue eloquent eyes, her half-foreign impetuosity and fervor, 
joined to the childlike softness of her voice and manners. 
She was sure to win friends among the noble-hearted and 
liberal-minded, as she would, had she mingled in society, 
have been certain to have gained unnumbered foes among 
her own sex and lovers among ours, as women worth the 
most always do. 

“The Molyneux are going to Paris, Lena,” said Mon- 
tressor, the morning before Alma left them. 

“ Indeed I Why and when ?” 

“Well, in the first place, Miss Molyneux must have 
change of air somewhere; she will go into consumption, 
ten to one. I suggested Italy, but she would not hear of 
it; her mother Paris, to v/hich her ladyship has certain 
religious, social, and fashionable leanings, all drawing her 
at once ; and to that she assented, poor girl I Pour cause, 
it is nearer the Crimea I” 

“ Is that Violet Molyneux ?” asked Alma, eagerly. They 
had fancied her asleep upon the sofa, but she had only 


2uC GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

closed her eyes to hide the unshed tears that rose from her 
heart and gathered under her silky lashes with every thought 
of De Vigne. “Is she not married to Colonel Sabre- 
tasche 

“No answered Lena Montressor, with a sigh of pro- 
foundest sympathy and pity. “A fortnight before their wed- 
ding-day, his first wife, whom he fully believed to be dead, 
came forward and asserted her rights. I never heard all 
the details, but it is easy to fancy what they both suffered. 
Now he has gone to the Crimea — but do you know her, 
Alma ?” 

“Did I know her? Yes! and how bright, how lovely, 
how radiant she looked I Oh, Heaven I how she must hate 
that woman I” And Alma shuddered as she thought how 
ahe would have hated the Trefusis if that lie, that fable, 
had been true. 

“And the wife, eh, what pity for her. Miss Tressillian I” 
smiled Montressor. 

Alma shook her head. “None! If she had left Col- 
onel Sabretasche all those years, long enough to make him 
think her dead, she could care nothing for him.” 

“ Perhaps he left her. There are always two sides to a 
question, mesdemoiselles, and nobody can ever judge be- 
tween a husband and a wife.” 

“Now don’t talk didactically,” cried his own wife. “If 
we ever come before the Divorce Court, I shall have 
nothing to do but to show in court, and my judges will 
give me my verdict as they gave Phryne hers, for my perfect 
loveliness I I won’t have you defend that horrid first wife. 
A man as handsome as I know Colonel Sabretasche is 
could have no sins, and I should never forgive an angel 
who had clouded the light in Violet Molyneux’s lovely 
eyes.” 

Montressor laughed j he would not have forgiven an 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


201 


angel for quenching the light in the eyes that looked at him 
then so mischievously. 

“ She is very lovely, I admit, and little deserves the sad 
fate she has met with now. It is pitiable to see her; per- 
haps an ordinary observer might not notice her so much, 
for it is a romantic fallacy that, in youth, sorrow wrinkles 
the brow and whitens the hair at one coup; if it did, most 
people would be aged before their twenties ! but, to a med- 
ical man, the utter despair of the eyes, and that dangerous 
hectic flushing up so strongly one minute, and fading so 
suddenly till she is as white as the dead, tell him more than 
enough. She holds herself as fully bound to Colonel 
Sabretasche, I believe, as though their engagement had 
never been broken; Lord Molyneux sanctions the idea, 
but you may be sure my lady will do her best to over- 
come it.” 

“Is Colonel Sabretasche gone to the Crimea asked 
Alma. It touched her strangely, this story of Yiolet 
Molyneux, that radiant belle whom she had once so much 
envied. How utterly had all their fates changed since that 
brilliant ball in Lowndes Square but three months before, 
when such perfect and cloudless happiness had seemed so 
secure to Violet; when on Alma had only dawned the 
first roseate hue of unconscious love, and all the bitterness 
of passion was as yet far away from her I 

“Yes, he was ordered off with his Lancers; and so 
thorough a soldier as I have heard he was, with all his 
dolce and love of ease, would hardly have refused the cam- 
paign, even had it taken him from his first bridal days.” 

“ No ; but she would have gone with him I — and they are 
going to Paris, you say ?” 

“Yes, I recommended it; so did Dr. Watson, when he 
sounded Violet’s lungs, and agreed with me that there was 
DO mischief yet, though there may be before long; if 


202 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


change of air does not send her cough away, they must take 
her to Florence or Biarritz. After her parting with Col- 
onel Sabretasche, she lay where he had left her, in a dead 
swoon, from which they could not wake her. They sent 
for the physicians and for myself, and all the night through 
she had a succession of fainting fits; since then she has 
never recovered ; she will smile, she will talk to her mother, 
to her friends ; but her health suffers for all that. A casual 
observer, as I say, would not notice it; but I can see that it 
is an even chance if she ever recover the shock given her in 
the very time of her fullest joy, her utmost security. Lady 
Molyneux would like to have a companion for her in Paris ; 
the Viscountess will have a thousand religious excitements 
and social amusements, in which her daughter will not par- 
ticipate, and she would like to find somebody to keep 
Violet company and rouse her, as Lady Molyneux will 
have neither time nor inclination to do. I did not know — 

I thought would you ” And Montressor hesitated; 

for though he knew how unprovided for and unprotected 
Alma was, he had too much intuitive delicacy and gener- 
osity to like to touch upon it. 

“Would they take me?” said Alma, lifting her head. 
The sentence “Paris is nearer the Crimea” rang in her ear : 
who could tell but what, once there, she might get still nearer 
to him ; besides, Violet would correspond with Colonel Sab- 
retasche ; Sabretasche and De Vigne were most intimate 
friends ; they were in the same arm of the service, they 
would be together; she would be far nearer De Vigne 
with the Molyneux than in the dreary solitude of St. 
Crucis, where, forsaken by him whose presence had once 
illumined it, she felt that she could never endure to be left 
alone to watch, to wait, to think ; dreading every hour, 
and ignorant whether each of them might not bring the 
tidings of his death, every sun that set and dawned might 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


203 


not shine upon the battle-field, where he lay, his life 
quenched and gone forever. 

“Would you go 

“Yes,” said Alma, pressing her little hands convulsively. 
“Yes — if I am free to leave them when I will. Miss 
Molyneux was very kind to me; I think she would take 
me if she knew.” 

“Miss Molyneux has not heard anything of it; it is her 
mother’s idea; but I will mention it to the Viscountess 
when I go to town to-morrow',” said Montressor. “Since 
you know them, I have no doubt she will be very happy to 
give you the preference, and change of air will do you 
good as well as her daughter.” 

Alma did not answer him ; she thought that both to 
Violet and her air and scene mattered little, while to all 
climes they took with them the curse of absence from those 
that both held dearer than life itself. ' 

Montressor was as good as his word. Some years be- 
fore, Violet’s brother, then a graceless Etonian, now a 
young attache to the British Legation at Paris, had been 
nearly drowned in the Thames, and had been pulled 
out at last to go through a severe attack of bronchitis, 
which all but cost him his life, would probably have done 
so quite but for Montressor, to whom Jockey Jack was 
so grateful for saving his only heir’s life — a life so value- 
less in itself, but so all-important, since the continua- 
tion of the Molyneux line depended on that empty-headed 
and bad-hearted Oppidan — that he gave the doctor the 
most beautiful mare in his stables, and had him called in 
whenever there was any illness in the family, though Mon- 
tressor, at the onset, had mortally offended Madame by 
assuring her she would have very good health if she would 
only leave off sal-volatile, and get up before one o’clock 
in the day On that Lady Molyneux had nothing more to 


204 


granviLle de vigne. 


say to him till her pet physician, who had kept her good 
graces by magnifying her migraines and flattering her 
nerves, once very nearly killed her by doctoring her for 
phthisis when her disease was but the more unpoetic ail- 
ment of liver, and she was glad to have Montressor back 
again. Since that time he had always had a certain influ- 
ence over the Viscountess, possibly because he was the 
only man who had seen her without her rouge, and told 
her the truth courteously but uncompromisingly, and when 
he mentioned Alma as a companion for Violet, her lady- 
ship graciously acquiesced. “ Miss Tressillian ? She did 
not recollect the name. Very likely she had seen her, but 
she really could not remember. A little artist, was she ? 
Oh, she thought she had some recollection of a little girl 
Violet patronized, but she couldn’t remember. If Mr. 
Montressor recommended her, that was everything; as 
long as she was ladylike and of unimpeachable moral char- 
acter, that was all she required. She only wanted her to 
be with them in case Violet were unwell or declined society. 
She must be free to leave them any day she chose? What 
a very singular stipulation I However, rather than have 
any more trouble about it, would he have the goodness to 
tell her she would give her fifty guineas and her traveling 
expenses; and they should leave London that day week.” 

“Fifty guineas I Less than her maid makes by her 
place !” thought Montressor, as he threw himself into a 
Hansom to drive back to the W aterloo station. He was 
essentially a generous man himself; he had no scant of 
benevolence about him; he considered that to people deli- 
cately nurtured, with refined tastes and quick sensibilities, 
the struggles, the mortification, the narrowed and cruel 
lines of poverty are far harder than to the poor, born 
amid squalor, nurtured in deprivation, whose most re- 
splendent memories and dreams are of fat bacon and fried 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


205 


potatoes. He was generous, but discriminatingly so ; and 
though he compelled his just dues from the man who had 
lamb and peas at their earliest, while by a wobegone face 
and dextrous text he was making the rector believe him 
an object of profoundest pity, Montressor would not take 
a farthing from the young girl, on whose delicate organ- 
ization and quick susceptibilities he knew the poverty, 
from which her own talents had alone protected her, and 
from which in illness they could not guard her, must prey 
most heavily. I need not say how Alma felt and took 
his kindness ; felt it with the warmth of a heart touched by 
the slightest thought of her into gratitude deep and last- 
ing ; took it with the frankness of a nature too generous 
itself to harbor false pride, thinking, indeed, of a time when 
she should be able to repay it — not to rid herself of the 
obligation, but to show him her own undying gratitude. 

Alma was grateful; her nature more quick at apprecia- 
ting, more tenacious in remembering kindness done her 
than any one’s I ever knew; all the charity and tender- 
ness shown her in her suffering in Windsor sank deep into 
her heart, never to be effaced or forgotten in happier hours, 
should such ever come to her. Still when, the day before 
her departure from England, she gazed round the room at 
St. Crucis, where the pictures he had praised, the flowers 
he had given, the brilliant bird that syllabled his name, the 
very sunshine that had never seemed bright save in his 
presence ; the room where his burning love-vows had been 
spoken, where his passionate caresses had spoken eloquence 
stronger than words, where everything breathed of him 
whose presence was life to her, and absence death, Alma 
threw herself upon the ground with more bitter tears than 
Ue Yigne — many women as had loved him — had ever had 
shed for him. “ Granville, Granville, ray only friend, why 
have you forsaken me ?” 

VOL. ii. 18 


flRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


m 


PART THE TWENTY-SECOND. 

I. 


ONE OP THOSE WHOM ENGLAND HAS FORGOTTEN. 

f 

The chill Crimean winds blew from the north of Sebas- 
topol, and the dust whirled and skerried before our eyes, 
as we kept the line in front of Cathcart’s Hill on the morn- 
ing of the 8th September, while the Guards stood ready 
in Woronzofif-road, and the Second and Light Divisions 
moved down to the trenches, and the Staff stationed them- 
selves in the second parallel of the Green Hill Battery, and 
the amateurs, who had come out to see what was doing in 
the Crimea, as they went other years to Norwegian fishing 
or Baden roulette, were scattered about in yachting cos- 
tume, and stirred to deep excitement as the Russian shells 
began to burst among us and the bombs to fall with thuds 
loud enough to startle the strongest nerves. 

What would young ladies at home, full of visions of 
conquering heroes and myrtle and bay leaves, and all the 
pomp and circumstance of war, have said if, in that cold, 
dusty, raw Crimean morning, they had seen General Simp- 
son, with only nose and eyes exposed, coddled up in a 
great-coat, and General Jones, a vrai heros in spite of all 
costume, in his red bonnet de nuit — a more natural accom- 
paniment to a Caudle lecture than to a siege — and Sir 
Richard, with his pocket-handkerchief tied over his ears 
after the manner of old ladies afflicted with catarrh ? Ah 
me I it was not much like Davy Baird leading the forlorn 
hope under the hot sun of Seringapatam, or Wellington, 
“pale but ever collected,” giving his prompt orders from 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


IfiOT 

tlie high ground behind San Cliristoval ! Yet, God knows, 
there was daring and gallantry enough that day to have 
made of the Redan a second Ciudad Rodrigo ; that it was 
not so, was no fault of the troops; the men whom TJnett 
and Windham tossed up to lead would, had they been 
allowed, have given England as complete a success as they 
gave her invincible pluck, and the dead bodies piled high 
on the slopes of the Great Redan were offered up ^s cheer- 
fully and as nobly as though the fancied paradise of the 
Mahometan soldier awaited them, instead of the ordinary 
rewards of the British one — abuse and oblivion. 

Heaven forefend that I should attempt to give you a 
description of the morning of the 8th. William Russell 
has told all our stories for us better than we could any of 
us tell them for ourselves ; a man engaged in a battle or an 
attack can only see things as they go on around him, spe- 
cially when stationed, as we were, at some little distance 
from the actual encounter; while smoke and dust and a 
leaden-colored atmosphere all interfered with a view of 
those ‘‘dun-colored, rugged parapets,” where young boys 
fresh from their native villages were sent to fight some of 
the best-drilled regiments of Europe. 

The tricolor waved from the parapet of the Malakofi*, 
and Chapman’s Battery sent up the sparks of four rockets 
against the raw gray clouds. Our men at the signal left 
the fifth parallel, and the Russian muskets swept along 
their ranks to such deadly result that in the few minutes’ 
passage upward to the salient, Shirley, Yan Straubenzee, 
Handcock, Hammond, Welsford, most of their leaders and 
many of their officers, were hors de combat, if not dead. 
Then, as all the world knows, there were but half a dozen 
ladders, and those few were too short 1 But the officers 
led on and the troops followed them, jumping down into 
the ditch fifteen feet deep, and scaled the parapet, and 


20S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


once in, the carnage began, where, “fed by feeble driblets,” 
and unable to form into line, not all the heroism of their 
leaders or the courage of their ofiQcers could prevent their 
being shot down pele-melc. We could see little beyond 
the great dull parapets of the Redan, and the troops that 
were pouring into and over it, and, though they were forced 
back again under the dense smoke of the Russian mus- 
ketry, twice capturing the position, and twice pushed back 
down the slopes, slippery with human blood and piled with 
human bodies. It was afterward, from the wounded that 
were brought down the Woronzofif-road, and from the 
remnant that came back unscathed from the reeking salient, 
that we heard the detail of the struggle in which we could 
take no part; heard how Windham held the triangle with 
the storm of shot seething round him, and crossed alone, 
amid the death-rattle of grape and rifle bullets, with his 
gallant, “Now mind, let it be known, in case I am killed, 
why I went away” — to demand too late the support which 
should have been there unasked ; heard how Pat Mahoney 
fell dead in the embrasure, shouting beside his colonel, 
“ Come on, boys, come on !” how Lysons, of the 23d, shot 
through the thigh, still kept his ground, cheering on his 
men to the very last; how Handcock was shot through 
the brain, and his body carried past the picket-house, where 
his wife was watching for him, back out of that fatal sali- 
ent; how Molesworth sprang upon the parapet and lighted 
his cigar, smoking and cheering on his fellows to follow 
him. And we heard, too, what all the individual daring 
could not retrieve to any of us, least of all to those who 
did all that men could do to fight against the disadvantages 
with which the attack on the Redan was encircled at every 
side, — we heard how the fire from the traverses killed off 
the storming party so rapidly that there was no force left 
large enough to sweep across ; how the gabions gave way 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


20& 


and broke down with the men gathered upon them ; and 
Rowland, trying to charge across the open space with his 
handful of men, had almost all of them shot down one 
after the other; how the ofiBcers, picked out by the Rus- 
sian fusillade, fell on every side, marked out by their own 
daring, and their men, bewildered for want of leaders, got 
mixed together, and, rushing in inextricable confusion to 
the front, were swept down by the Russians, who, covered 
by their breastworks, could be but little injured by our fire. 

We heard how three times Windham sent for the sup- 
port, without which nothing decisive could be done in that 
fatal scene of carnage, where the British, unbacked, had 
nothing but broken ranks to oppose to the steady fire ol 
the enemy and to the fresh troops who were swarming from 
the town and the evacuated Malakofi*. We heard how, when 
at last he had leave “to take the Royals,” the permission 
came too late ; how the Russians, collecting some thousands 
of their troops behind the breastworks, charged our troops 
with the bayonet, while tjieir rear ranks poured over their 
heads a volley upon our men, who averaged one against 
three Muscovites, and were unable to form from the nar- 
row neck of the salient. We heard how hand-to-hand our 
plucky fellows stood their ground against the granite mass, 
that, swelling every moment from the rear, pressed down 
upon them, till those who had held the salient, unsupported 
for an hour and three-quarters, under a fire that thinned 
their ranks as a scythe mows down meadow grass, grap- 
pling to the last with the Russians in the embrace of 
death, were forced from the loose earth and breaking 
gabions that made their ground, and, pelted with great 
stones, were driven down by the iron tramp that crushed 
recklessly alike friend and foe, till slipping, panting, bleed- 
ing, exhausted, pele-mele, they fell on to the mass of bayo- 
nets, muskets, and quivering human life that lay mingled 

18 ^ 


210 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


together in the ditch below, the men rolling over each 
other like oose stones down a crevasse ; the living crushed 
by the dead, the dying struggling under the weight of the 
wounded ; the scarps giving way and burying not a few 
alive, while those who could struggle from the horrible 
heap of human life, where the men lay four deep, ran for 
life and death to reach the English trench. We heard 
that, and more too — longer details than can find space 
here — and, if we were not “Christian” to swear as fiercely 
as we did to avenge the Redan ; if we had not done so, 
we should scarcely have been human — we should assuredly 
have not been English. Sad stories passed from one 
another. We were all down in the mouth that night; for 
though the officers had been as game and as gallant as 
men could be, flinging down their lives as of no account, 
their men had not imitated them ; and it was hardly the 
tale that we, after the long winter of ’54-’55, and the 
weary, dreary, hopeless months of inactiom, had hoped to 
be rewarded with, by sending honje to England. Welling- 
ton was wont to say that the saddest thing, after a defeat, 
was a victory. I think his iron heart would have broken 
over the loss of human life, the waste of heroic self-devo- 
tion that was seen on the parapets of the Redan. 

We knew that Curly was to lead the — th with the 
Light Division that day, and we thought of him anxiously 
enough when we saw from Cathcart’s Hill the smoke pour- 
ing out from the rugged parapets, and the troops fighting 
their way over, only to be sent forth again decimated and 
exhausted. 

I saw him early on the morning of the 8th, when we 
were all looking forward to the attack, and hoping, though 
but faintly, for success that should make the long-watched 
city ours. 1 saw him about half-past six, before we were 
posted, as he was chatting with some other fellov/a of ihtf 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


211 


Light Division about the coming assault, which they were 
longing for as ardently as in days passed away they nad 
longed for the dawn of the 1st or the 12th. Curly w^as in 
better spirits than he had been since he landed in the 
Crimea: he put me strangely in mind of the little fellow 1 
had first known at Frestonhills, as he stood in that care- 
less nondescript costume which we dandies of the Queen’s 
had adopted, his old gay debonnaire smile on his lips, a 
cap much the worse for wind and weather on those silky 
yellow locks that we had teased his life out about in the 
old school-days; a pipe of good Turkish tobacco peering 
out from beneath his long blonde moustaches a la Hongrois. 
I had not seen him look so much like his old gay light- 
hearted self since the campaign began ; and as w'e paced 
past him in the raw gray morning, I laughingly wished him 
good luck; he laughed, too, as he told us he w'as going in 
for all the honors now, and should have a clasp the more 
to his medals than we. De Yigne, as we passed, pulled 
up his horse for a second, bent from his saddle, and gave 
him his hand, with a sudden impulse. Bitter words had 
been between them — words such as he had found it hard to 
pardon ; but now his old warm love for Curly rose up in 
him, and, forgetting or forgiving all, he looked on him 
kindly, almost wistfully, and offered his Frestonhills pet as 
warm a grasp as before Alma Tressillian and their mutual 
love for her had come between them. For the first moment 
Curly’s eyes flashed with angry fire; then the better spirit 
in him conquered, his hand closed firm and wmrm on De 
Vigne’s, and they looked at one another as they had used 
to do in days gone by, before the love of woman had parted 
them. 

T'herc was no time for speech ; that cordial shake of 
tfieir hands was their silent greeting and farewell, and wo 
left Curly laughing and chatting with his pipe in his lips, 


212 


GRANVILLE DE IGNE. 


and his lithe, youthful figure standing out against the gray 
cold sky, while we rode onward to form the line on Cath- 
cart’s Hill. I think De Vigne thought more than once of 
his old school pet when from our post we saw the ramparts 
of the Redan belching forth fire and smoke, and the am- 
bulances coming down the Woronzoff Road with their 
heavy and pitiful burdens. Both he and I, I fancy, 
thought a good deal about Curly that day leading his 
Light Bobs on to the Russian fusillade. We saw them 
through the clouds of dust and smoke scale the parapet, 
with Curly at their head, some of the foremost to enter 
the Redan; we lost them amid the obscurity which the 
fire of the musketry and the flames of the burning em- 
brasure raised around the scene of carnage and confusion, 
and whether he was there among the remnant who were 
forced over the parapet and fell, or jumped, pele-mele, into 
that mass of human misery below, where English pluck 
was still so strong among them that some laughs they say 
were heard at their own misery, we could not tell. If I 
were a believer in presentiments, which I am not, having 
seen too much real life to have time to accredit the mystic, 
I could fancy our thoughts of Curly were a foreboding of 
his fate. But a very few out of the gallant — th lived 
through the struggle in the salient, and the perilous pas- 
sage back to our own advanced parallel; there were but a 
very few left of the old veterans, and the young recruits, 
who had gone up that morning to the assault of the 
Redan, with devotion enough in their commanders to 
have made of it a second Badajoz, and poor Curly, their 
Colonel, was not among them — not even among the 
wounded in the temporary hospitals; but late that night, 
Kennedy, one of his sergeants, told to De Vigne and me 
and a few other men another of those stories of individual 
heroism so great in their example, so unfortunate in their 


GRANVILLE T)E VIGNE. 


213 


rewttfd ; telling it in rough, brief words, not picturesquely 
or poetically, yet with an earnestness that gave it elo- 
quence to us, with those frowning ramparts in front and 
those cr-owOed hospitals behind : 

“ We was a’mdst the first into the Redan, Major. When 
I see the ladders, so few, and what there was on ’em so 
short, I began to think as how we should never get in at 
all ; but Colonel Brandling, he leaped into the ditch and 
scrambled up the other side as quick as a cat, with a cheer 
to do yotir heart good, and we went a’course after him and 
scaled the parapet, while the Russians ran back and got 
behind tue traverses to fire upon us as soon as we got 
atop. What possessed ’em I don’t know. Major, but 
you’ve heard that some of our men began loading and 
file-firing instead of follering their officers to the front; 
so many trench-bred infantry men will keep popping 
away forever if you let ’em ; but the Colonel led on to 
the breastwork with his cigar in his mouth, just where 
he’d put it for a lark when he jumped on the parapet. 
There was nobody to support us, and our force weren’t 
strong enough to carry it, and we had to go back and 
get behind the traverses, where our men were firing on 
the Russians, and there we stayed, sir, packed together as 
close as sheep in a fold, firing into the Redan as long as 
our powder lasted. I can’t tell you, Major, very well how 
it all went on; it wasn’t a right assault like, it was all 
hurry-scurry and confusion, and though the officers died 
game, they couldn’t form the troops ’cause they were so 
few, sir, and the salient so narrow. But it was the Colonel 
1 was to tell you about. Major. I was beside him a’most 
all the time. At first he seemed as if nothing would hit 
bim ; one ball knocked his cap off, and another grazed his 
hair He had as near shaves as Colonel Windham, but he 
took it all as careless as if he was at a ball, and he just 

2r 


214 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


turned to me, sir, with his merry smile: ‘G^od fun, eh, 
Kennedy V Them was the last words he spoke, sir. J ust 
at that minute the enemy charged us with the bayonet, 
and the devils behind ’em began to pour volleys on us 
from the breastwork. Four of them Russians closed round 
the Colonel, and he’d nothing but his sword against their 
cursed bayonets. I closed with one on ’em; he was as 
hard as death to grip with. The Colonel killed two of 
’em offhand, though they was twice as big as he, but the 
third, just as his arm was lifted, ran him right through the 
left lung, and a ball from them devils on the breastwork 
cut off one of his feet, just as the shot cut off Major Trow- 
bridge’s last year. Then he fell straight down. Major, ''f 
course, and I was a going to fight my way to him and 
carry him off in my arms, and I would ha’ done it, sir, 
too, but the Russians pressed so hard on the front ranks 
that they pushed us straight off the parapet, and I only 
caught a sight of the Colonel lifting himself up on his 
elbow, and waving us on with a smile — God bless him ! — 
and then I fell over into the ditch, with Pat O’Leary atop 
of me, and I see him no more. Major, and he must be dead, 
sir, or else a prisoner in that confounded city.” 

And honest Kennedy, whose feeling had carried him 
beyond recollection of delicate language or other pres- 
ence than his own, stopped abruptly. In his own words, 
he “felt like a fool,” for Curly, like Eman of the 41st, was 
loved by all the men who served under him. 

De Yigne set his teeth hard as he listened; he turned 
away, sick at heart. Memories of his Frestonhills pet 
thronged upon him: the little fellow who had been so 
eager for his notice, so proud of his patronage; the 
merry, light-hearted child, with his golden locks and his 
fearless spirits; the wild young Cantab, with his larks and 
his deviltry; the dandy Guardsman about town, su game 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


215 


in tlie hunting-field, so bored in the ball-room; the warm, 
true, honest heart, unstained by the world he lived in ; the 
friend, the rival, who had loved his love more unselfishly 
than he. Poor little Curly ! — and he was lying yonder, 
behind those smoking ramparts, wounded and a prisoner 
I — perhaps dead 1 

For an instant De Yigne’s eyes flashed with eagle glance 
over the stormed city, lying there grim and gaunt, in the 
shadow of the gray-hued day, and but that his duty as a 
soldier held him back, I believe he would not have hesitated 
to cross those death-strewn lines alone, and rescue Curly 
or fall with him. 

The Crimea is not so far distant but that the world 
knows how we were awakened the morning after by the 
Russian general’s masterly retreat, by thunder louder than 
that which had stunned our ears for twelve months long, by 
the explosion of the Flagstafi’ and Garden batteries, by 
the tramp of those dense columns of Russian infantry 
passing to the opposite side, by the glare of the flames 
from Fort Nicholas, by the huge columns of black smoke 
rising from Fort Paul, by the sight of that fair and stately 
Empress of the Euxine abandoned and in flames! Little 
did the people at home — hearing Litanies read and hymns 
sung in the village churches nestling among the fresh Eng- 
lish woodlands — dream what a grand funeral mass for our 
dead was shaking the earth with its echoes that Sabbath 
morning in the Crimea. 

It was as late as Wednesday before De Yigne and I got 
passes from the adjutant-general’s office, and went into the 
town before whose granite ramparts we had lain watching 
and waiting for twelve w^eary months. What a road it 
was through the French works I a very Fair Rosamond’s 
maze of trenches, zigzags, and parallels, across the French 
sap, where every square inch might be marked “Sta 


216 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


viator, heroem calcas;” treading our way through the 
heaps of dead, where the men lay so thickly one on the 
other, just as they had fallen, shoulder to shoulder, till wo 
were inside the Malakolf. It was horrible there, even to 
us, used as we were to bloodshed, and to mangling, and to 
human suffering in every form of torture. I wonder how 
it would have suited the nerves of those gentlemen who sit 
at home at ease, and dictate from their arm chairs how this 
should have been done, and that should have been avoided ? 

I fancy Messieurs the Y olunteer Rifles, who think themselves 
just now “so much better than a standing army,” taken in 
to such a sce-ne after one of their days of ball-practice or 
Hyde Park turn out, would very likely turn sick and faint, 
and not find “ soldiering” quite so pleasant as firing at a 
butt and toasting the ladies. Four piles of dead were 
heaped together like broken meat on a butcher’s stall — 
not a whit more tenderly — and cleared out of the way like 
carrion ; the ground was broken up into great pools of 
blood, black and noisome ; troops of flies were swarming 
like mimic vultures on bodies still warm, on men still con- 
scious, crowding over the festering wounds, (for these men 
had lain there since Saturday at noon !) buzzing their death- 
rattle in ears already maddened with torture ; that was what 
we saw in the Malakofif, what we saw a little later in the 
Great Redan, where, among cook-houses brimful of human 
blood, English and Russian lay clasped together in a fell 
embrace, petrified by death ; where the British lay in heaps, 
mangled beyond recognition by their dearest friends, or 
scorched and blackened by the recent explosions, and 
where — how strange they looked there ! — there stood out- 
side the entrance of one of the houses a vase of flowers 
and a little canary, rebuking, as it were, with their soft 
and gentle beauty, the outrage of Nature that stretched 
around them. But we did not stay to notice the once 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 21 '! 

white and stately city, now ruined and defaced, wi^h its 
snow-like walls, now black and broken with our shot ; we 
went straight on toward Fort Paul, as yet untouched, 
where stood the hospital, that chamber of horrors, that 
worse than charnel-house, from which strong men re- 
treated, unable to bear up against the loathsome terrors 
it inclosed. That long, low room, with its arched roof, 
its square pillars, its dim, cavernous light coming in 
through the shattered windows, was a sight worse than all 
the fabled horrors of painter, or poet, or author; full of 
torment — torment to which the crudest torture of Domi- 
tian and ISfero were mercy — a hell where human frames 
were racked with every possible agony, not as a chastise- 
ment for sin, but as a reward for heroism ! De Yigne, iron 
as his nerves were counted, used as he had been to death 
and pain, strong soldier as he was, capable of Spartan 
endurance and braced to English impassibility, closed his 
eyes involuntarily as he entered, and a shudder run through 
his frame as he thought of who might be lying there among 
those dead and dying men that the Russian general had 
abandoned to their fate. There they lay, packed as closely 
together as dead animals in a slaughter-house — the many 
Russians, the few English soldiers, who had been dragged 
there after the assault, to die as they might ; they would 
but have cumbered the retreat, and their lives were value- 
less now! There they lay: some on the floor that was 
slippery with blood like a shamble ; some on pallets, satu- 
rated with the stream that carried away their life in its 
deadly flow; some on straw, crimson and noisome, the 
home of the most horrible vermin; some dead hastily 
flung down to be out of the way, black and swollen, a 
mass of putrefaction, the eyes forced from the sockets, the 
tongue protruding, the features distended in hideous gro- 
tesqueness; others dead, burnt and charred in the explo- 
VOL. II. 19 


218 


GRANVJLLE DE VIGNE. 


Bioii, a heap of blanched bones and gory clothes and black- 
ened flesh, the men who but a few hours before had been 
instinct with health and hope and gallant fearless life I 
Living men in horrible companionship with these corpses, 
writhing in torture which there was no hand to relieve, no 
help from heaven or earth to aid, with their jagged and 
broken limbs twisted and powerless, were calling for water, 
for help, for pity ; shrieking out in wild delirium or dis- 
connected prayer the name of the woman they had loved 
or the God that had forsaken them, or rolling beneath their 
wretched beds in the agony of pain and thirst which had 
driven them to madness, glaring out upon us with the 
piteous helplessness of a hunted animal, or the ferocious 
unconsciousness of insanity. 

We passed through one of these chambers of terrors, 
our hearts sickened and our senses reeling at the hideous 
sight, the intolerable stench that met us at every step. 
Great Heaven I what must those have endured who lay 
there days and nights with not a drop of water to soften 
their baked throats, not a kind touch to bind up their 
gaping wounds, not a human voice to whisper pity for 
their anguish ; before their dying eyes scenes to make a 
strong man reel and stagger, and in their dying ears the 
shrieks of suffering equal to their own, the thunder of ex- 
ploding magazines, the shock of falling fortresses, the burst 
of shells falling through the roof, the hiss and crash and 
roar of the flaming city round them I 

We passed through one chamber in which we saw no 
one who could be Curly, or at least who we could believe 
was he, for few of the faces there could have been recog- 
nized by their nearest and their dearest — for not Edith’s 
quest of Harold wanted so keen an eye of love as was 
needed to seek for friend or brother in the hospital of 
Sebastopol. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


219 


We entered a second room, where the sights and the 
odors were yet more appalling than in the first. Beside 
one pallet De Yigne paused and bent down ; then his pale 
bronze cheek grew white, and he dropped on his knee be- 
side the wretched bed — at last he had found Curly. Poor 
dear Curly I still alive, in that scene of misery, lying on 
the mattress that was soaked through with his life-blood, 
his broken ankle twisted under him, the wound in his 
shoulder open and festering, his eyes closed, his bright hair 
dull and damp with the dew of suffering that stood upon 
his brow, his face of a livid blue-white hue ; the gay, gal- 
lant, chivalrous English gentleman, thrown down to die as 
he would not have had a dog left in its suffering. On one 
side of him was a black charred corpse, swollen in one 
place, burnt to the bone in another ; could that ever have 
been a living, breathing human soul, with thought and 
hope and life, loving, acting, aspiring? — the woman that 
loved him best could not have known him now ! On the 
other side of him, close by, was a young Russian officer 
but just dead, with an angry frown upon his handsome 
features, and his hands, small and fair as a girl’s, filled 
with the straw that he had clutched at in his death agony ; 
and between these two dead men lay Curly ! 

De Vigne knelt down beside him, lifting his head upon 
his arm. “My God, Arthur, is he dead ?” 

At the familiar voice his eyes unclosed, first with a 
dreamy vacant stare in them — his mother’s heart would 
have broken at the wreck of beauty in that face, so fair, so 
delicate, so handsome but a few days before. 

“Curly, Curly, dear Old fellow I — don’t you know 
me ?” 

How soft and gentle was De Yigne’s voice as he spoke, 
with that latent tenderness which, though all had chilled, 
nothi -ig could wholly banish from his heart I 


220 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Curly looked at him dreamily, uncousciously. “ What I 
is that the prayer bell ? Is the Doctor waiting 

His thoughts were back among the old school-days at 
Frestonhills, when we first met at the old Chancery — when 
we little thought how we were doomed to part under the 
murderous shadow of Fort Paul. 

De Yigne bent nearer to him. '' Look at me, dear old 
boy. You must know me, Curly.” 

But he did not ; his head tossed wearily from side to 
side, the fever of his wounds had mounted to his brain, 
and he moaned out delirious disconnected words. 

“ Why don’t they form into line, Kennedy — why don’t 
they form into line? If there were more of us, we could 
take that breastwork. Water! — water! Is there not a 
drop of water anywhere’^ We shall die of thirst. I 
should like to die in harness, but it is hard to die of thirst 
like a mad dog — like a mad dog — ha! ha !” (Both of us 
shuddered, as the mocking, hideous laughter rang through 
the chamber of death.) “Alma! — Alma! Who talked of 
Alma? Can’t you bring her here once, just once, before I 
die ? I think she would be kinder to me now, perhaps ; I 
loved her very much; she did not care for me — she would 
not care now— she loves De Yigne. You know how I 
have hated him — my God ! how I have hated him — and 

yet 1 loved him once better than any man till she came 

between us. Oh, for God’s sake, give me water — water, 
for the love of Heaven !” 

At the muttered raving words De Yigne’s face grew as 
livid for the moment as that of the dead Russian beside 
him, and his hand trembled as he took a flask from his 
belt that he had filled with sherry before starting, and held 
it to Curly’s lips. How eagerly he drank and drank, as if 
life and reason would flow back to him with the draught! 
For a time it gave him strength to fling off the faintness 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


221 


and delirium fastening upon him ; his eyes grew clearer and 
softer, and as De Yigne raised him into a sitting posture, 
and supported him on his arm with all the gentle care of 
woman, he revived a little, and looked at him with a con- 
scious and grateful regard. 

“De Yigne ! How do you come here ? Where am I f 
Oh ! I know; is the city taken, then ?” 

Dying as he was, the old spirit in him rallied and flashed 
up for a brief moment, while De Yigne told him how the 
Russians had retreated, leaving Sebastopol in flames. But 
he was too far gone to revive long; he lay with his head 
resting on De Yigne’s arm, his eyelids closed again, his 
breathing faint and quick, all his beauty and his manhood 
and his strength stricken down into the saddest wreck that 
human eyes can see and human passions cause. Few could 
have recognized the once gay, brilliant Guardsman, whom 
women had loved for his beauty and his grace, in the 
wounded man who was stretched on that wretched and 
gore-stained pallet, with his life ebbing away simply foi 
want of that common care that a friendless beggar would 
have been given at home. 

“Is the city won ?” he asked again; his low and feeble 
words scarcely heard in the shrieks, the moans, the mut- 
tered prayers, the groans, the oaths around him. 

“Yes, dear Curly,” answered De Yigne, not heeding the 
pestilence of which the air was reeking, and from which 
many a man as strong as he had turned heart-sick away, 
while he bent over the death-bed of the friend who so 
many years ago had been his pet and favorite at Fres- 
ton hills. 

“1 am glad of that,” said Curly, dreamily. “England 
is sure to win ; she is never beaten, is she ? I should like 
to fight once more for her, but I never shall, old fellow; 
the days here — how many are they ? — have done for me. 


222 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


It is hard to die like this, De Yigne!” And a shudder 
ran through his frame, that was quivering with every 
torture. “God knows, I longed to fall in the field, but 
not a bullet would hit me there; however, it does not 
matter much; it comes to the same thing; and if we won, 
that is all I care. Tell my mother I die quite content, 
quite happy. Tell her not to regret me, and that I hav« 
thought of her often, very often — she was good and gentle 
to me always — and bid my father, if he loves me, to be 
kinder to Gus — Gus was a good old fellow, though we 
made game of him.’^ 

Curly paused; slowly and painfully as he had spoken, 
the exertion was greater than his fading strength could 
bear ; he, three days before the ideal of manly vigor, grace, 
and beauty, was powerless as a new-born child, helpless as 
a paralyzed old man, stricken down like a gracious and 
beautiful cedar-tree by the hacking strokes of the wood- 
man’s axe, its life crushed, its glory withered ; only to be 
piled amid a heap of others to make the bonfires for a 
conqueror’s ovation. 

De Yigne bent over him, his cheek growing whiter and 
whiter as he thought of the boy’s early promise and sunny 
boyhood, and of the man’s death amid such horror, filth, 
and desolation as England would have shuddered to com- 
pel her paupers, her convicts, nay, the very unowned dogs 
about her streets, to suffer in; yet made small count of 
having forced it on her heroes to die in it like murrained 
cattle. 

“Curly, dear Curly,” he whispered, pushing off the 
clammy hair from Brandling’s forehead as gently as any 

woman, “why talk of death? Once out of this d d 

hole,” (ah, reverend Christians in England, you would 
have found it hard to keep to holy language amid such 
horrors as De Yigne saw then!) “you will get well, old 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


223 


fellow; you shall get well; men have got over wounds 
ten times more dangerous than yours. We shall nave 
many a day together still at home among the bracken 
and the stubble.” 

Curly smiled faintly: 

“No, never again. I do not die from the wounds; what 
has killed me, De Vigne” — and at the memory the old de- 
lirious vagueness grew over his eyes, which wandered away 
into the depths of his dire prison-house — “has been the 
sights, the scents, the sounds. Oh, my God, the horrors 
I have seen I In sermons we used to hear them try some- 
times to describe a hell; if those preachers had been here 
as I have been, they would have seen we don’t want devils 
to help us make one — men are quite enough I The stench, 
the ravings, the roar of the flames around us, the vile creep- 
ing things, the blasphemy, the prayers, the horrible thirst 
. — oh, God I I prayed for madness, De Yigne; prayed for 
it as I never prayed for anything in all ray life before, and 
yet I am no coward either!” 

Ue stopped again, a deathly gray spread over his face, 
and a cold shiver ran through him; the brain, last of all 
to die, the part immortal and vital amid so much death, 
triumphed yet awhile over the dissolution of the body. 
Curly knew that he was dying fast, and signed De Vigne 
down nearer still to him. 

“De Vigne, when the war is over, and you go back to 
England, first of all try and seek out Alma Tressillian.” 

The fierce red blood crimsoned De Vigne’s very brow; 
had it been a living and not a dying man who bad dared 
to breathe that name to him, I think he would have pro- 
voked a reply he would have little cared to hear. All the 
mad passion, all the infinite tenderness there were' in his 
heart, stronger still than ever, for his lost love, rose up at 
the aorupt mention of her. 


224 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Will you promise me?” asked Curly; “to give me 
peace in my death-hour, promise me.” 

“No,” said De Yigne, between his teeth, clinched like 
an iron vice. “ I cannot promise you. Why should you 
wish me? You loved her yourself ” 

^'Because I loved her myself, because I love her still; 
love her so well that it is the thought that in my grave I 
shall never hear her little soft voice, never see her bright- 
blue eyes, never meet her once again, that makes me 
shrink from death,” said Curly; an unutterable tenderness 
and despair in those faint broken tones whose last utter- 
ance was Alma’s name. “ I do love her, too well to believe 
what you believe, that she is Vane Castleton’s mistress.” 

De Vigne’s hands clinched the straw of the pallet like a 
man in bodily agony. 

“For God’s sake be silent! Do not drive me to 
madness. Do you think I should believe it without 
proof? ” 

“On the spur of anger and jealousy you might. I do 
not know, I cannot tell, but I could never think her capa- 
ble of falsehood, of dishonor,” whispered Curly, his breath 
growing shorter, his eyes more dim, though even on his 
haggard cheek a flush just rose, wavered, and died out, as 
he went on : “The day she — she — rejected me I accused her 
of her love for you, and then she answered me as a woman 
would hardly have done if she had not cared for you very 
dearly. Before I left England I left all I had to her; it 
is little enough, but it will keep her from want. Let some 
one seek her out, even though she were sunk in the lowest 
shame, and see that they give her my money. It will save 
her from the vije abyss to which Castleton would leave hei 
to sink down as she might; — as she must. Promise me, 
De Yigne — or you, Chevasney — promise me, or I cannot 
die in peace.” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2^5 


"‘No, no, I promise you.” 

Hoarse and low as De Yigne’s voice was. Curly lieard 
li., a look of gratitude came into the eyes once so bright 
and fearless, now so dim and dull. 

“And if you find that she does love you, you will not 
reward her for her love as we have done too many ?” 

Whiter and whiter yet grew De Yigne’s face, as his 
hands clinched harder on the straw of Curly’s bed; it was 
some moments before he spoke ; 

“I dare not promise that. God help me !” 

But his words fell on ears deaf at last to the harsh fret 
and bustle of the world; the faintness of that terrible last 
struggle of brain and body with the coming chill of death 
had crept over poor Curly. Sudden shiverings seized him, 
the mind, vanquished at last, began to wander from earth — 
whither who can dare to say? — dark-blue shadows deep- 
ened under his hollow eyes, the life in him still lingered, as 
though loth to leave the form so brief a space ago full of 
such beautiful youth, such gracious manhood; to watch it 
flickering, struggling, growing fainter and fainter, ebbing 
away so slowly, so surely, dying out painfully, reluctantly, 
and to know that it might all have been spared by the com- 
mon care that at home would be given to a horse, to a dog. 
God knows, there are sights and thoughts in this world 
that might well turn men into fiends. He gave one sigh, 
one heavy sigh deep drawn, and turned upon his side: 
“My mother — Alma!” Those were the last words he 
uttered ; then — all light died out of his eyes, and the life 
so young, so brave, so gallant, had fled away forever. De 
Yigne bent over the reeking straw that was now the funeral 
bier of as loyal a heart as ever spent itself in England’s 
cause ; and bitter tears, wrung from his proud eyes, fell on 
the cold brow, and the closed features that never more 


226 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


would light up with the kind, fond, fearless smile of friend- 
ship, truth, and welcome. 

“I loved him,” he muttered. “ God help me ! Such is 
ever my fate I My mother — Alma — Curly — all lost I And 
no bullet will come to me!” 

In his own arms De Vigne bore Curly out from the 
loathsome charnel-house, where the living had been en- 
tombed with the dead. We buried him with many another, 
as loyal and gallant as he, who had died on the slope of 
the Great Redan ; and we gave him a soldier’s gravestone : 
a plain white wood cross with his name and his regiment 
marked upon it, such as were planted in thick, those two 
long years, on the hills and valleys of the Crimea. God 
knows if it be there now, or if the Russian peasant has 
not struck it down and leveled the little mound with his 
plowshare and the hoofs of his heavy oxen. We have left 
him in his distant grave. England, whom he remembered 
in his death-hour, has forgotten him long ere this. Like 
many another soldier lying in the green sierras of Spain, 
among the pathless jungle of the tropics, amid the goldeu 
corn of Waterloo, and the white headstones upon Cath- 
cart’s Hill, the country for which he fell scarcely heard 
his name, and never heeded his fate. There he lies in his 
distant grave, the white and gleaming city he died to win 
stately and restored to all her ancient beauty, the waters 
of the Alma rolling through its vineyards as peacefully as 
though no streams of blood had ever mingled with its flow ; 
the waves of theEuxine Sea bearing slowly on the Crimean 
sands a requiem for the buried dead. There he lies in his 
distant grave ; God requite England if ever she forget him 
and those who braved his danger, found his death, and 
shared his grave. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


2.^7 


II. 


HOW INCONSTANCY WAS VOTED A VIRTUE. 

There was a ball at the Tuilcries. The bells had fired, 
and the bonfires blazed upward through the still September 
night in dear old England for the fall of Sebastopol ; and 
M. Louis Napoleon, in imitation of the holy men of old, 
had been to his Te Deum in Notre-Darne, making much 
of his Mamelon Vert to a populace whom his uncle had 
won with Mont Tabor and Areola. There was a ball at 
the Tuileries, that stately palace that has seen so many 
dynasties and so many generations, from the polished Pairs 
de France gathered round the courtly and brilliant Bour- 
bons, to the Marechaux roturiers, with their strong sworda 
and their broad accents, crowding about the Petit Caporal, 
taking camp tone into palace salons. There were that 
aight all the English elite, of course, in honor of the “ al- 
liance;” and there was among the other foreign guests one 
Prince Carl Wilhelm Theodore Vallenstein-Seidlitz, an 
Austrian, with an infinitesimal duchy and a magnificent 
figure, a tall, strong fellow, with the blue eyes and fair hair 
of the Teuton race, a man of few words and only two pas- 
sions: the one for belles tallies, the other for gros jeu. 

He had been exchanging a few monosyllables with the 
Empress, and now leant against the wall of one of the 
other reception-rooms, regarding, with calm admiration, 
the beauty of the Duchess d’Albe, until his attention wan- 
dered to a new face that he had not seen before, and he 
turned to a young fellow belonging to the British Legation, 
and demanded, with more consideration of brevity than of 
grammar, “Qui?” 


228 


GllANVlLLE DE VlQNE. 


“ Ma soeufj mon Prince.” 

‘‘ Ciel ! quelle taille ; pas grande, mais quelle taille I” 

With which, for him, warm encomium. Prince Carl 
stroked his blonde moustaches and studied her silently for 
five minutes. Then he asked another question : 

“Pourquoi est-ce que je ne Pai jamais vue ?” 

“Parceque vous n’etes pas arrive a Paris, que depuis 
huit jours; et parceque’elle est diableraent eprise d’uu 
homme marie, qui est dans la Crimee, et, si c’etait permis 
par ma m^re; elle ne voudrait pas aller dans le monde.” 

The Austrian shrugged his shoulders. 

“Hein! tin homme marie 1 Comme les femmes aiment 
les pomraes defendues I Introduisez moi, mon cher, je la 
ferai Poublier.” 

So Rushbrooke Molyneux introduced the Duke of Yal- 
lenstein-Seidlitz to his sister, and the bold Teuton eyes 
fastened on Violet with delight at that belle taille, whose 
grace and outline eclipsed all he had ever seen. I am not 
sure that a casual observer would have noticed any change 
in our brilliant belle. The eyes had lost their riant and 
cloudless regard ; the soft rose hue upon her cheeks was 
altered to an excited flush at times, a marble pallor at 
others ; and the smile that had before been so spontaneous 
and so heartfelt, now faded off her lips the moment courtesy 
ceased to require it. Beyond that, there was little altera- 
tion. At her years the most bitter curse upon the mind 
does not always stamp itself upon the features, and though 
Violet never affected a gayety which her heart refused, and 
did not care who saw that, while Sabretasche was in danger, 
she shrank from all scenes of pleasure and distraction, she 
knew that she was pitied and that he was blamed, and that 
knowledge was sufficient to rouse her Irish spirit to face 
the world, which would only have amused itself with her 
sorrow and taken occasion for fresh condemnation of him, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


22J 


so — she let the wolf «^naw at her vitals, but closed her soft, 
girlish lips with the heroism of the Spartan, and suffered 
no word of pain to escape them which might be construed 
into a reproach to him. 

Yallenstein looked on her belle taille, and on her lovely- 
face, never noticing the weary depths in the eyes that 
seemed “looking afar off,” and the haughty chillness of 
tone into which Yiolet, surrounded with men who would 
willingly have taught her to forget, had unconsciously 
fallen in self-defense ; but thought to himself, as he drove 
away to a less formal and well-nigh as gorgeous an enter- 
tainment in a cabinet particulier at Yefours : “ Qui le 
diable est ce peste d’homme marie? N’importcl Je la 
ferai Poublier.” And Lady Molyneux, too, thought, as 
her maid unfastened her diamond tiara : “ If the cards are 
pbiyed. well, I may make Yiolet Duchess of Yallenstein- 
Seidlitz. It would be the best match of the season. His 
hotel here is very fine, and Madame de la Hauteville says 
bin Yiennese palace is charming. What a pity it seems 
Sabretasche has never had anything happen to him 1 — if he 
were not in that Crimea alive to write her letters and feed 
this romance, I could soon bring her to reason. However, 
as it is, a great deal may be done by firmness ; I am glad 
Rushbrooke is so intimate with Yallenstein; Rushbrooke 
has just such views, he will never throw himself away for 
love — if I could only persuade Yiolet how utterly unne- 
cessary a grande passion is — indeed, in marriage, positively 
inconvenient! She will outgrow her romance, of course; 
still it is time we put an end to it, some way or other. 
Her dresses mount up very expensively. I must have that 
lace — only three hundred guineas, dirt cheap 1 and I don’t 
believe the women will let me have it unless I pay part of 
their bill, tiresome creatures. I paid them up every far- 
thing seven years ago, but that sort of persons grow so 

VOL. II. 2* 


230 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


rude now-a-(lays, instead of being thankful for one’s cus- 
tom, that it is utterly insufferable. I must certainly marry 
Violet to somebody, and I will not procrastinate about it 
any longer. I shall be hrm with her I” 

With which resolution my lady sharply bade her 
femme de chambre be quick and brush out her hair, and 
composed herself to her slumbers till Jeanne and the 
chocolatiere and a French novel should arouse her at 
noon: while on the other side of the partition-wall that 
divided their chambers, Violet, an hour ago the belle of 
imperial salons, with her graceful languor, and her match- 
less loveliness, and her glittering court dress, lay on her 
couch, her long hair unbound, her pillows wet with bitter 
tears, pouring out all her soul in passionate prayer, and 
sinking at last into the slumber of exhaustion, with his 
letters clasped tightly in her hands, till the gleam of the 
morning sun, shining in through the persiennes on her 
cheeks, found the tears still wet upon them, while the lips 
that had so often touched his were still murmuring Sabre- 
tasche’s name. 

The Molyneux had come to winter in Paris. Coraliyne, 
though it looked well enough in Burke, was utterly unin- 
habitable; London was out of the question till March, 
and the Viscountess, tired of traveling, and bored with 
the Bads, had taken a suite in a hotel in the Champs 
Elysees, where, between her French acquaintance and her 
English connections, the fashionable Chapels and the 
Boulevard, the Opera-Comique and the jeunesse doree, the 
shops and her own petit soupers, she contrived to spend 
her days tolerably pleasantly, especially as there was a re- 
markably handsome Confessor of her friend Madame de la 
HauteviDe’s, who gave her unusual piquancy in her re- 
ligious excitements, and made her think seriously of the 
duties of auricular confession. (It is commonly said that 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


231 


women make the best devotees — doubtless for causes too 
lengthy to enter upon here — but I wonder, if religions had 
no priests, how many of their fairer disciples would they 
retain ?) And now, Lady Molyneux had another object in 
life— rto woo Prince Carl for her daughter. Bent on that, 
purpose, she tried to make the Hotel Clachy very delight- 
ful to him, and succeeded. Violet paid him no attention — 
barely as much as courtesy dictated to a man of his rank 
and to her father’s guest — but he cared nothing for con- 
versation, and as long as she sat there, however haughtily 
silent, and he could admire her belle taille as he liked, he 
wished for no words, though he might have desired a few 
smiles. Still she was the first woman who had neglected 
him, and to men as courted as the Austrian that is a better 
spur thap any, and he really grew interested when he found 
it not so easy '‘de la faire oublier I’absent.” 

“C’est en bon train,” thought my lady; “if only Violet 
were more tractable, and Sabretasche would not write I” — 
would not live was in her thoughts, but naturally so re- 
ligiously-minded a woman could hardly “murder with a 
wish,” and, having no other weapons than her natural ones 
of tongue and thought, planned out a series of ingenious 
persecutions against her daughter till she had induced her 
to marry either Regalia, who had followed them to Paris, 
or the Duke of Vallenstein. She rather preferred the lat- 
ter, because the little German Court, could she transplant 
Violet thither, would be too far away for men to compare 
disadvantageously, as they did now, the passe with the 
perfect beauty. It is very inconvenient for a handsome 
coquette woman to have constantly beside her one twenty 
years younger, who waltzes better than herself, and needs 
no cosmetiques. 

“My dear Violet, oblige me with a few minutes’ conver- 
«ation,” said my lady, one morning. 


232 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Yiolet looked up and followed her passively; her man- 
ner was as soft and gentle as of old — even gentler still to 
those about her — but the chill of her great grief was upon 
her, and her mother’s persistence in teasing her to go into 
society, or to receive attentions which to Violet seemed 
semi-infidelity to Sabretasche, had taught her a somewhat 
haughty reserve quite foreign to her nature, in defense not 
only of herself, but of the allegiance, which she never at- 
tempted to conceal, that she gave to him as faithfully as 
though he had been her husband. 

“My dear Yiolet,” began the Viscountess, seating her- 
self opposite to her daugher in her own room, “may I ask 
whether you absolutely intend dedicating all your days to 
Vivian Sabretasche ? Do you really mean to devote your- 
self to maidenhood all your life because one man happens 
not to be able to marry you ?” 

The color rose on Violet’s white brow ; the sensitive 
wound shrank at any touch, how much more so from one 
coarse and unfeeling; and my Lady Molyneux, religious 
and gentle woman though she was, could use Belgravian 
Billingsgate on occasion. The blood mounted over her 
daughter’s pale features; she answered with involuntary 
hauteur : 

“Why do you renew that subject? You know as well, 
as I that, unless I marry Colonel Sabretasche, I shall 
never marry any one. It is a subject which concerns no 
one but myself, and I have told you, once for all, that I 
hold myself as fully bound to him as if the vows we hoped 
to take had passed between us I” 

Her voice trembled as she spoke, though her teeth were 
set together. Her mother was the last person upon earth 
to whom she could speak either of herself or of Sabre- 
tasche. The Viscountess sighed and sneered en memo 
temps. 


GRANVILLE BE VTGNE. 


233 


“Then do you mean that you will refuse Regalia?” 

“I have refused him.” 

“You have I” And my lady, with a smile, drank a little 
eau-de-Cologne by way of refreshment after hearing such 
a statement. “I suppose you know, Yiolet, that you will 
have no money; that if you do not make a good match 
now yon are young and pretty, nobody will take you when 
you are the dowerless passe daughter of a penniless Irish 
Peer? And Yallenstein-Seidlitz, may I inquire if you 
have refused him, too?” 

“He has not given me the opportunity; if he do, I 
shall.” 

“If he do, you will? You must be mad — absolutely 
mad!” cried her mother, too horrified for expression. 
“Don’t you know that there is not a girl in the English, or 
the French, or the Austrian empire, who would not take 
such an offer as his, and accept it with thanksgiving? 
The Yallenstein diamonds are something magnificent; he 
is a thorough Parisien in his tastes, most perfeet style, 
and ” 

“Oh yes I I could not sell myself to better advantage !” 

“Sell yourself?” repeated the peeress. Fine ladies are 
not often fond of hearing things called by their proper 
names. 

“Yes, sell myself,” repeated Yiolet, bitterly, leaning 
against the mantle-piece, with a painful smile upon her 
lips. “Would you not put me up to auction, knock me 
down to the highest bidder? Marriage is the mart, 
mothers the auctioneers, and he who bids the highest 
wins. Women are like racers, brought up only to run 
for cups, and win handicaps for their owners.” 

“Nonsense I” said her mother, impatiently. “You have 
lost your senses, I think. There is no question of ‘selling,’ 
as you term it. Marriage is a social compact, of course, 
20 * 


234 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


whore alliances suitable in position, birth, and wealth, are 
studied. Why should you pretend to be wiser than all the 
rest of the world? Most amiable and excellent women 
have married without thinking love a necessary ingre- 
dient. Why should you object to a good alliance if it 
be a marriage de convenance?” 

“Because I consider a marriage de convenance the most 
grosu of all social falsehood. You prostitute the most 
sacred vows and outrage the closest ties ; you carry a lie 
to your husband’s heart and home. You marry him for 
his money or his rank, and simulate an attachment for him 
that you know to be hypocrisy. You stand before God’s 
altar with an untruth upon your lips, and either share an 
unhallowed barter, or deceive and trick an affection that 
lovefj and honors you. The Quadroon girl sold in the 
slave-market is not so utterly polluted as the woman free, 
educated, and enlightened, who barters herself for a ‘mar- 
riage for position.’” 

Something of her old passionate eloquence was roused 
In her, as she spoke with contempt and bitterness. Her 
heart was sick of the follies and conventionalities that 
surrounded her, so meshing her in that it needed both 
spirit and endurance to keep free and true amid them 
all. Lady Molyneux was silent for a minute, possibly in 
astonishment at this novel view of that usual desideratum 
— a marriage for position. 

“My dear Yiolet, your views are very singular — very ex- 
traordinary. You are much too free of thought for your 
age. If you had listened to me once before, you would 
never have had the misery of your present unhappy in- 
fatuation. But do listen to me now, my dear — do be 
sensible. The eye of society is upon you; you must act 
with dignity; society demands it of you. You must not 
disgrace your family by pining after a married man. ' It 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


235 


was very sad, I know — very sad that affair; and I daro 
say you were very attached to him. Everybody knows he 
was a most handsome, gifted, fascinating creature, though, 
alas I utterly worldly, utterly unprincipled. Still, even if 
you suffered, I think your first feeling should have been 
one of intense thankfulness at being preserved from the 
fate you might have had. Only fancy if his wife had not 
declared her claims before your marriage with him ! Only 
fanc;y , my dear Yiolet, what your position in society would 
have been I Every one would have pitied you, of course, 
but not a creature could have visited you I” 

The silent scorn in her daughter’s eyes made her pause : 
she could not but read the contempt of her own doctrines 
in them, which Yiolet felt too deeply to put into words. 

“I have no doubt it was a very great trial,” she con- 
tinued, hurriedly; “I am not denying that, of course; still 
what I mean is, that your duty, your moral duty, Yiolet. 
was, as soon as you found that Yivian Sabretasche was the 
husband of another, to do your very utmost to forget him. 
certainly not to foster and cherish his memory as persist- 
ently and willfully as you do. It is an entire twelvemonth 
since you parted from him, and yet, instead of trying to 
banish all remembrance of your unhappy engagement and 
breaking entirely with him, you keep up a correspondence 
with him — more foolish your father to allow it ! — and ob- 
stinately refuse to do what any girl would be only too 
happy to do who had been the subject of as much gossip 
as you have been of late, — form a more fortunate attach- * 
raent, and marry well. I tell you that your affection for 
Colonel Sabretasche, however legitimate its commence- 
ment, became wrong, morally wrong — a sin to be striven 
against witn every means in your power, as soon as you 
learned that he was married to another w'oman.” 

, At last the Yiscountess paused for breath; the scorn 


236 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNB. 


whicli had been gathering deeper and deeper in Yiolet^s 
face burst into words ; she lifted her head, that her mother 
might not see the thick blinding tears that gathered in her 
eyes : 

“A sin? To love Mm! with the love God himself has 
created in us — the noblest, best, least selfish part of all 
our natures I You cannot mean what you say I The sin, 
if you like, were indeed to forsake him and forget him; 
that were a crime, of which, if I were capable, you would 
indeed have reason to blush for me. When I know him 
noble in heart and character, worthy of every sacrifice that 
any woman could make him, so true and generous that he 
chose misery for himself rather than falsehood toward me, 
am I then to turn round and say to him, ‘Because you 
cannot marry me — in other words, give me a good income, 
home, and social position, contribute to my own aggrand- 
izement, and flatter my own self-love, I choose to forget 
all that has passed between us, to ignore all the oaths of 
fidelity and affection I once vowed to you, and sell what- 
ever charms I have to some buyer free to bid a better price 
for them ?’” 

The satiric bitterness in her tone stung her mother into 
shame, or as faint an approach to it as she could feel, and, 
like most people, she covered an indefensible argument 
with vague irritation. 

“ Really, Yiolet, your tone is highly unbecoming toward 
me: if you own no obedience to a parent, you might at 
the least show a little respect for the opinion of a person 
of so much larger experience than yourself. I have abso- 
utely no patience with your folly ” 

Yiolet stopped her with a gesture as of physical suffer- 
ing, but with a dignity in her face that awed even her 
mother into silence. 

“Not even you shall ever apply such a term to any de- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


237 


votion I can show to him. lie is worthy all the deepest 
love of a woman far nobler and better than I ever shall be, 
whose only title to such a heart as his is that I hold him 
dearer than my own life, I promised him my allegiance 
once when the world smiled upon our love ; because the 
world now frowns instead, do you suppose that I shall 
withdraw it ? Do not torture me any more with this cruel 
discussion; it is ended once for all. I shall ncucr marry 
any other; it will always be as useless to urge me as it 
is useless now. God knows whether we may ever meet 
again; but, livincr or dead, 1 am forever bound to him.” 

Every vestige of color fled from her face as she spoke ; 
her small white fingers were clasped together till her rings 
cut into the skin; there was an utter despair, a passionate 
tenderness in her voice, which might have touched into 
sympathy, one would have thought, even the coldest 
nature. But (I do not think one can blame my Lady 
Molyneux; if she was born without feelings, perhaps she 
was hardly more responsible for the non-possession of 
them than the idiot for the total absence of brain) her 
mother was not touched, not even silenced, by the sight 
of the suffering, which, though she checked its utterance, 
was only too easily read on Violet’s face and in her voice. 

“Is that your final decision?” she said, with a sneer. 
“Very well, then I I will tell Vallensteiii that my daugher 
Intends to lead a semi-conventual life, with the celibacy, 
but not the holy purpose, of a nun, because she is dying 
with love for a handsome roue who happens to be a married 
man. I dare say he will enjoy telling the story at the 
Tuileries, and there are plenty of women, my love, who 
will like nothing better than a laugh against yow.” 

“You can say what you please,” answered Violet be- 
tween her teeth. 


23S 


GRANVli'.LE DE VIGNE. 


But that she was her mother, the Viscountess would 
have had a far sharper retort- 

“ Of course I can ! And stories grow strangely in passing 
from mouth to mouth ! Dear me, is it three o’clock ? And 
I was to be at Notre-Dame by half-past, to hear that divine 
creature, Alexis Dupont!” And my lady floated from the 
room, while her daughter leant her head upon the mantle- 
piece, the tears she had forced back while in her mother’s 
presence falling hot and thick on the chill marble — not 
more chill than the natures that surrounded her in the gay 
world of which she was so weary. Her heart was sick 
within her, the burden of her life grew heavier than she 
knew how to bear. 

“Vivian, Vivian, why did you leave me, why did you 
forsake me? Would to God that I were near you! Any 
fate were better than this — any fate, any fate ! Would to 
God that I could die with you !” burst from her lips, while 
the form that Vallenstein coveted shook with uncontroll- 
able sobs. 

How long she stood there she did not know; her 
thoughts were all centered on that inexorable misery of 
absence, which stretched like a great gulf between those 
two, so formed to make each other not only happy, but 
tenderer, nobler, better, as two lives each incomplete with- 
out the other may well become when blended into one. 
How long she stood there she did not know, till hands as 
soft as her own touched hers, a face as fair as her own was 
lifted to hers, a voice whispered gently to her, “ Why do 
you talk of dying? For you, of all, life should be bright 
and beautiful!” Violet lifted her head with a faint smile; 
she had not heard her entrance ; a v^olume lay open by 
chance on a table beside her, and she pointed at the passage 
that was on the open page ; 


GRANVILLE DE VTONE. 


239 


To feel that thirst and liunger of our soul 
We cannot still, that longing, that wild impulse, 

And struggle after something we have not 
And cannot have; the effort to be strong. 

And, like the Spartan boy, to smile and smile 
While secret wounds do bleed beneath our cloaks. 

All this the dead feel not — the dead alone ! 

Would I were with them ! 

** Do you not understand that, Alma 

“Do I not I” 

Alma spoke witli that passionate vehemence natural to 
her, which, while her dark-blue eyes grew darker still, with 
a grief in them more sad than tears, expressed in those 
three little words how much of sympathy, suffering, and 
despair I In their long intercourse, which had been the 
intercourse of friends rather than that usual in their relative 
positions, the tenderest chord in the heart of both had never 
been touched ; each of them would have shrank from un- 
veiling what was most sacred and most near, and the love 
which they felt was never desecrated by being pulled out 
as public wares, and tainted by the sentimental atmosphere 
of “confidences.” 

Yiolet, struck by her tone, looked down at her, forget- 
ting for the moment her own sorrow : in Alma’s passionate 
eyes perhaps she read a history similar to her own ; perhaps 
she guessed that Alma’s association with De Vigne had not 
been broken without a wrench, to one of the two at least; 
probably she thought that he, whom she had only known 
satirical, and to all appearance utterly unimpressionable, 
had won the girl’s love carelessly, and cared nothing for 
her in return. At least she saw enough to tell her that 
she was not the only one who suffered, and, moved by a 
sudden impulse of pity, Violet Molyneux stooped and 
touched with her lips the white arched brow that had once 
flushed beneath Dc Vigne’s caresses. 


240 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


‘‘Alma, you are the only woman I have ever met who 
thought and felt as I do ; tell me, what do you call 
fidelity?” 

“ Fidelity ?” repeated Alma, with that instantaneous 
flash of responsive feeling on her mobile features which it 
had been De Yigne’s pleasure to summon up and watch at 
his will. “There is little of it in the world, I fancy. A 
marriage is to me null and void without fidelity, not only 
of act, but of thought, of mind, of heart; and fidelity, how- 
ever wide, the distance, however great the severance, makes 
in God’s sight a marriage tie holier than any man can 
forge, and one which no human laws can sever. AVhat do 
I call fidelity ? I think it is to keep faithful through good 
report and evil report, through suffering, and, if need be, 
through shame; it is to credit no evil of the one loved 
from other lips, and if told that such evil is true by his 
own, to blot it out as though it never had been ; to keep 
true to him through all appearances, however against him, 
through silence and absence and trial ; never to forsake 
him even by one thought, and to brave all the world to 
serve him; that is what seems fidelity to me, — nothing 
less — nothing less!” 

Her eyes flashed, her lips quivered, her thoughts were 
with De Yigne. A tender love, an undying sorrow, were 
spoken on every feature of her expressive face, as, turned 
full to A’'iolet, the sunlight fell upon it ; showing the shadow 
beneath the eyes, the passion in them, the weary thought 
on her brow and lips, which love for De Yigne had stamped 
Uiere. 

Yiolet looked at her and sighed ; she was too unselfish 
not to regret, even amid her own sorrow, that another 
should share a similar fate ; and she felt little doubt either 
that De Yigne cared nothing for his former protegee, or 
that he had left her, with his love unspoken, but'his mar- 


GRANVILLE HE VIGNE. 


211 


riage told. She liked the depth of feeling and delicacy of 
nature which made Alma, impulsive and demonstrative aa 
she was, hold her attachment to him too sacredly to speak 
of it, and hear his name, when it was occasionally mentioned 
in the Molyneux circle, without betraying “the secret wound 
beneath the cloak,” loving the hand that had given that 
wound too well to murmur to others at its pain. The 
similarity of nature and of fate touched Violet. Absorbed 
as she was in her own bitter trial, she had liked the Little 
Tressillian, and felt a sensation of rest and sympathy when 
with her which she found with no other in the whirl of her 
fashionable and heartless home ; but now she felt almost 
afiection for her, the first warmth of feeling into which she 
had been roused since the deadly blight of severance and 
sufiering had fallen on her brilliant life. Softer tears than 
those that had burned in her eyes before stood in them as 
she looked at her. She stooped over Alma as she sat on 
a low chair, her head bent, her thoughts far away, and 
passed her jeweled hand over the golden hair that De 
Vigne had drawn through his fingers, those shining silken 
threads that had held him closer than chains of iron. 

“You are right 1 We must give ‘nothing less.’” 

Alma, for answer, threw her arms round Violet and 
kissed her with all the fervor which no sorrow could wholly 
chill out of her half Southern nature — the first warm, fond 
caresses which had touched Violet’s lips since Sabretasche 
was parted from her. That was all that passed between 
them then or afterward on what lay nearest to the hearts 
of both, yet that little was enough to awake a strange 
sympathy between them, none the less real because it was 
silent. Poor little Alma I life was bitter enough to her 
now. Twelve months had passed ; she was still as far 
from De Vigne as when she lay chained to her sick-bed in 
Kcubeu’s cottage. Thy letter she had written at Montres* 
VOL. II. 21 


I 


242 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Bor’s had miscarried; De Yigne had never had it. Hear* 
ing nothing from him, she had written again, passionately, 
imploringly, a letter that would have touched a heart far 
harder and more steeled against her than his : that shared 
the fate of many others that winter; many others that lay 
in the bottom of the harbor, or went Heaven knows where, 
while we were wearily waiting for them to bring some- 
thing of the old familiar light from the Christmas fires at 
home into our cheerless tents. Undaunted, she wrote a 
third time. That letter she received back, sealed again, 
and directed to her in a writing that she knew but too 
well, firmly, boldly, with not a trace allowed to appear in 
the clear caligraphy of the passionate agony in which the 
words were penned. She knew then that he believed her 
false to him, that he accredited that horrible impossibility 
that she had forsaken him and fled withYane Castletoii; 
that the circumstantial evidence which had told so strongly 
against her had crushed out all faith and trust and tender- 
ness in his heart toward her. It was the most cruel wound 
Alma had ever had, to find herself so readily doubted, so 
harshly given up, so unjustly denied even a hearing. 
would never have believed evil against him if all the world 
had sworn it to me I” she thought, her proud and high- 
spirited nature stung by the doubt and the injustice from 
him to whose full faith she knew she had so full a right. 
Injustice was always very bitter to her; it roused all that 
was dark and fiery in her character. From anybody else 
she would never have forgotten or pardoned it; certainly 
never have stooped to clear herself from it. It was the 
strongest proof of all of the intensity and self-oblivion of 
her love for De Yigne, that she forgave him even his ready 
suspicion of her fidelity, and thought less of her own wrong 
and suffering than of all she knew he endured in thinking 
her — his own darling, to whose lips his love caresses had 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


243 


clung so passionately that warm summer night when they 
had last parted — false and worthless, lost to him forever. 

But as I have said, Alma, with all her impulsiveness and 
expansiveness to De Vigne, never wore her heart on her 
lips; on the contrary, she was more reserved and silent on 
the things that were dearest and deepest to her than any 
one would have fancied from her frank, gay, childlike ex- 
terior. She was as sensitive as he to all touch of those 
more delicate mimosas that she sheltered in her heart; 
over them she was hau^ity, proud, reserved ; deep feeling, 
whether her own or another’s, was too sacred to her to be 
dragged out into daylight. She had, moreover, like all 
strong natures, great self-control and reticence. De Vigne’s 
name was too dear to her to be breathed before others 
She had resided twelve months with the Molyneux, and 
they never knew, though he was often mentioned casually, 
that his name merely spoken by another’s voice sent those 
bitter tears to her heart which were too deeply seated to 
gather to her eyes. 

Alma’s principles of honor and of trust were far more 
acute and refined than those of most people ; to her a tacit 
confidence was the same as a spoken bond; the love De 
Vigne had lavished on her in those few hours, when their 
hearts had throbbed as one, was sacred to her — a gift, a 
trust, a treasure reposed in her alone, not to be spread out 
before other eyes. It was his secret, his heart that she 
would have revealed, his confidence that she would have 
betrayed in bringing forward to others that love for him 
which for her own part she would have proudly and gladly 
avowed to all the world if needs be. Violet, the only one 
who would have guessed the bond there was between Alma 
and the Crimea, who would have translated the dilated 
terroi of her eyes when the morning })apers came in, the 
pallid anguish of her face when she bent over the Returns 


244 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


of killed and wounded, the darker gleam (tf her eyes when 
ever De Vigne’s name was mentioned by any of their set, 
or by some man who had come back from the Crimea from 
ill health or to bring dispatches, Violet was too absorbed 
in her own thoughts to notice what passed beside her, or 
at least to reflect or to muse upon it. She was pleased, as 
much so as the great grief that had so suddenly shadowed 
her life would allow her to rouse herself to be in anything, 
when she saw in the companion it had been her mother^s 
fancy to procure, the Little Tressillian, the girl artist, 
whom she had introduced at the ball in Lowndes Square, 
and whom she had once blindly and laughingly envied. 
She was kind to her, as Violet would at any time have 
been to any one in a subordinate situation; still more so to 
one in whom she recognized a nature as proud, as delicate, 
as high-bred as her own, and to whom she had always had 
a certain attraction ever since she had heard of her as the 
artist of the Louis Dix-sept. 

It was a peculiar position that Alma occupied in the 
Molyneux household, which was now — for some time, at 
the least — located in Paris. All of them, except Violet, 
had looked upon her as an employe and a subordinate, to 
be treated accordingly. The Hon. Rushbrooke, attach^ 
to the British Legation, admiring her chevelure doree, had 
thought he could make much the same love to her as to his 
mother’s maid, whenever that soubrette chanced to be a 
pretty one; Lady Molyneux had scarcely ever spoken to 
her, save when, struck with Alma’s great taste in dress, 
she would fain have had her turned into a sort of chef de 
toilette. But the Little Tressillian, conscious in herself 
of as good birth and breeding as any one of them, was 
quite able, clinging and childlike as she was in many 
things, to hold her own, and to make peo})le treat lier with 
the respect and dignity she merited by blood, by talent, by 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


245 


manners, by all save money. One worthy of De Yij^me’a 
love, she thought, was certainly worthy to be treated as an 
equal by these people; her haughty reserve and resent- 
ment of Rushbrooke’s attentions quickly sent that youth 
into dudgeon, and he would probably have joined the Tre- 
fusis and Yane Castleton in calling her “a little devil;’' 
Jockey Jack vowed she was as much of a lady as any of 
them; swore he’d known Tressillian in early days, — by 
George, he would have them civil to the little girl, and 
was civil to her himself, in his bluff, blunt, kindly-meant 
way ; even my lady was brought down to chill but decent 
politeness to her, by reverencing her in her secret heart for 
the art by which she managed to dress so prettily upon 
nothing; and Violet, won toward her as months passed on 
by that similarity and congeniality of heart and character 
which we had always noticed between them, was very kind 
to her, and gladly sought refuge in her society from the 
inanities, frivolities, scandals, and manoeuvres constantly 
poured into her ears by her mother, and from the whirl of 
a circle whose gayeties were now so foreign to her and so 
repugnant; until a tacit sympathy and a sincere regard 
grew up between them — the friendless artiste and tie 
fashionable belle. 




246 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


PART THE TWENTY-THIRD 

I. 


ALL THAT FIDELITY COST. 

It was Christmas night — Christmas-eve — and the mid- 
night mass was rising and falling in its solemn chant 
through the long aisles of Notre-Dame. The incense 
floated upward to the dim vaulted roof, the starry lights 
glittered on the gorgeous high altar, while the sweet swell 
of the cathedral choir rose on the still, hushed air, as 
through Paris, under the winter stars, there tolled one by 
one the twelve strokes of the midnight hour. 

Midnight mass in Notre-Dame! — it were hard to hear 
it bursting in its glorious harmony, its sonorous rhythm, 
after the dead silence of the assembled multitude, bursting 
at once from priest and people, choir and altar, without 
something of that poetry, that sadness, that veneration 
which lie in us, though lost and silenced in the fret and 
hurry of life — vague, intangible, subdued, as the last lin- 
gering notes of the Miserere. 

One by one the midnight strokes tolled slowly out upon 
the Christmas air; hushed as though no human heart beat 
among them, the gathered thousands knelt in prayer; the 
last stroke fell and lingered on their ears, and then, over 
their bowed heads, the rich cadence of the choir and the 
full swell of the organ notes rolled their richest harmonies 
of praise and supplication. Among the multitude knelt 
Violet Molyneux and Alma Tressillian, their thoughts far 
from creeds or formularies, from religious differences or 
religious credulities, but their hearts bowed in prayer more 
agonized, more fervent, more passionate in ds beseeching 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


247 


earnestness, for those far distant that they loved so well, 
than any that went up to Heaven from the frail suffering 
humanity gathered there in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. 
What was to them church, place, religion ? thus they 
prayed in the solitude of their own chambers; thus they 
would have prayed beside the sick-beds of Scutari ; thus 
they now prayed in the hushed aisles of a cathedral, where, 
if forms differed, human hearts at least beat beside them 
and around, with hopes, fears, griefs, passions, trembling, 
quivering, pleading for mercy, as in theirs I 

As they passed out of the great door to the carriage, 
they looked up to the still heavens, with the midnight stars 
shining calm and bright in the great cathedral of Nature, 
and in Violet’s eyes stood heavy tears, wrung from her 
love so tender and so mournful ; while Alma’s, tearless and 
burning with the passion that only grew stronger with 
each hour of doubt and absence, glanced wildly up to those 
distant stars, which from their spheres looked down on 
him 1 Both started, as a voice whispered by their sides : 

“Per Carital date la limosina per amor del Figlio di 
Dio I” 

They scarcely saw the beggar’s face, coming out of the 
gas glare into the moonlit night, but they heard the voice, 
broken, almost fierce — perhaps with hunger ! — in its sup 
plication, and both instinctively, and contrary to the cus- 
tom of either, stretched out their hands with an alms on 
Christmas-eve. As it chanced, Alma was the nearer to 
the suppliant, who caught her offered gift, but did not see 
Violet’s. The crowd following, pushed them on ; their 
carriage rolled away, while the woman, with Alma’s coin 
in her hand, looked after them with a strange expression 
on her haggard face, partly curiosity, partly hate, partly 
fear, yet with a tinge of regret and pain as she muttered, 
in Tuscan: 


243 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Santa Maria 1 questo sorriso rai fa peiisare di glil E 
presagio della morte — raa — per chi ?’’ 

The wild gaze of the Italian’s fierce dark eyes, the 
haunting tone of that shrill “Carital Carita I” still lin- 
gered in Alma’s mind as she rolled through the gay gas- 
lighted streets of Paris,' and her young eyes closed with a 
despairing sigh and a sickening shudder of dread, at this 
mysterious Human Life, which is so short in years, so long 
In suffering. 

The Paris winter passed ; passed as Paris winters ever do, 
with a gay whirl of glittering life for the rich, with cold, 
and hunger, and suffering for the poor; the gas flowers of 
Mabille burning at the same hour with the candle that 
gleamed its sickly light on the dead bodies at the Morgue. 
The Paris winter passed, and Violet Molyneux was still 
the belle of its soirees ; that chill hauteur which in self- 
defense she had assumed, was no barrier between her and 
the love that was pressed upon her from all quarters and 
highest ranks, evident as it was, by her equable coldness to 
all, that unless she ever married Vivian Sabretasche that ex- 
quisite loveliness would never be given to any man. Lady 
Molyneux did not distress herself so pitiably at this obsti- 
nacy as she had done before, for Prince Carl was not a 
man to be frightened by a girl’s repulse; he daily grew 
more entete of that “jolie taille” which had first drawn all 
that Vallenstein could conceive a grande passion needed 
to be. He called perseveringly ; he came as regularly as 
clock-work to their carriage in the Boulevards or the Pre 
Catalan ; he listened without a yawn to those songs which 
made the Parisians sigh that Violet could not be a prima 
donna — from all these the Viscountess argued that, with her 
own good management, the hand of Vellenstein-Seidlitz 
would ere long be offered to Violet, and then my lady, who 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


24 y 

did not believe in any resolution strong enough to with- 
stand a principality and gentle coercion, flattered herself 
that she should give checkmate to the person of all others 
she most disliked — Vivian Sabretasche. 

She was not mistaken. In February, Lord Molyneu^ 
received a letter with the stately royal seal of the Vallen. 
stein-Seidlitz, requesting the honor of his daughter’s hand. 
It came to him when they were at dinner; even with the 
length of the table between them, his wife knew, or thought 
she knew, the armorial bearings of the seal, as it lay up 
ward unopened, and congratulated herself wdth a rapid cast 
forward as to how many hundreds the trousseau would cost; 
but then the trousseau v/ould be one final expense, and 
Violet’s dress, in the present state of things, was an annual 
destruction of what without her my lady would have had 
for her own silks and laces, jewelry and point. As the} 
took their coffee, preparatory to their going to a ball in 
the Champs Elysees, at Madame de la Vieillecour’s superb 
hotel, Jockey Jack broke the seal, perused the missive with 
li>s spectacles on, and in silence handed it to his daughter. 
Violet read it, with pain, for she foresaw that she should 
hot be allowed to reject this, as she had done others, with- 
out contention and upbraiding, and gave it back to him 
as silently ; but the thin, jeweled hand of her mother inter- 
cepted it, with a snappish sneer: 

“Is your own wife. Lord Molyneux, to be excluded from 
all your confidences with your daughter?” 

“ What answ^er, Vy ?” asked Jockey Jack, turning a deaf 
ear to his lady, who had a knack of bringing forward her 
relationship to him on any disagreeable occasion, such as 
opening his notes or referring her creditors to him, but on 
all others ignored it very completely. 

“The same as usual, papa,” answered Violet, bending 


250 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


down to him as she rose to set her coffee-cup on a 
•jonsole. 

Lady Molyneux read Yallenstein’s formal and courtly 
letter with calm deliberation through her gold eye-glass; 
and Alma rose and left the room, guessing, with her in- 
tuitive tact and delicacy of perception, that this was some 
matter which they would prefer to discuss alone. Lady 
Molyneux read the letter, then folded it up and put it in 
its envelope. 

“Violet, would it be too much for me to ask to be 
allowed to share the confidence you gave your papa 
just now? Might I inquire what reply you send to Val- 
lenstein ?” 

Violet gave one’ sigh of inexpressible weariness; she 
was so tired of this ceaseless contention, the continual 
dropping of water on a stone ; this jangling and upbraid- 
ing; more trying, perhaps, than more active persecution 
to a mind that, like hers, was infinitely above it, a temper 
that was singularly sweet, and tastes that revolted from 
the low-toned worship of position, and the utter incapa- 
bility of understanding any warmer or deeper feeling, 
which stamped all her mother’s conversation, with wiiat 
was to Violet’s a species of vulgarity, good ton though 
Helena Lady Molyneux — a Lady in her own right — might 
be. She lifted her eyes with that low broken sigh, forced 
out of her by the martyrdom of daily petty badgering and 
polished vituperation. 

“Certainly you may, mamma. I thank Prince Carl for 
the honor he has done me; and I reject his offer with all 
the gratitude for his generosity that it merits.” 

Lady Molyneux shrugged her shoulders, and did not 
condescend to answer her. She turned to her husband, 
who was beating an impatient tattoo on the back of his 
couch. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


251 


“My dear Molyneux, do you intend, too, to refuse 
Prince Carl’s proposals ?” ^ 

Jockey Jack looked up with a curse on women’s tongues 
and on their tomfoolery of marriage and giving in marriage ; 
fond as he was in his way and proud of his daughter, he 
wished in his soul that Yy had been born red-haired, sal- 
low, or cross-eyed, rather than have her beauty bring these 
men’s bother and his wife’s perorations eternally about his 
ears ; he would have liked to see Violet well married cer- 
tainly, but if she was so exceptional as to have a distaste 
that way, why, the girl was young enough to wait if she 
chose ; she would outgrow her fanciful fidelity to Sabre- 
tasche — though he was a noble fellow, certainly. He 
looked up, ready to dissent from his wife at a moment’s 
notice. 

“ Yallenstein does not propose for me, my dear. I have 
nothing to do with it, except to tell him, as decently as I 
can, that Yy is very much obliged to him, but would rather 
be excused.” 

“Then you mean to countenance her in her folly?” 

“I don’t know what you mean by countenancing her; 
she is old enough to judge for herself, especially about 
her own husband. I dare say a royal marriage would 
have had great attractions for you, Helena, but if your 
daughter thinks differently there is no reason for you to 
quarrel about it,” said Jockey Jack, who did not see why 
one man was not as good as another to Violet, nor yet if 
they were not why she should be bullied about it. 

“/ see, if you do not,” said his wife, frigidly. “No, 
Violet, do not leave the room, I beg; 1 wish to speak to 
you on this subject. It is of the greatest importance that 
she should marry soon and marry well. The singularly 
unfortunate circumstances that attended her lamentable 
engagement — an engagement that would never have l>cen 


252 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


entered into if I had been listened to — have laid her open 
to a great deal of remark, and to be an object of such 
bavardage is never beneficial to any woman ” 

“Do you speak feelingly?” interrupted Lord Molyneux, 
sotto voce. 

“Indeed, very prejudicial to a young girl in the outset 
of life,” continued his wife, imperturbably. “Violet has 
now been out three years; girls that wp-re debutantes with 
her have settled well long ago. Beatrice Carteret, with 
not a tithe of her advantages, married the Duke of St. 
Orme in her first season ; and that remarkably ordinary 
little Selina Albany drew Whitebait into a proposal, and 
he settled a hundred thousand upon her Tor pin-money ” 

“That’ll do, that’ll do,” cut in Lord Molyneux, impa- 
tiently. “St. Orme is an old brute, who bullied his first 
wife into consumption, and as for Whitebait, he’s a young 
fool, whom his uncle tried to get shut up for idiocy; if Vy 
can’t do better than that, I would rather she lived and died 
a Molyneux. If you’ve no better arguments for marriage, 
Helena ” 

“At all events,” said my lady, with her nastiest sneer, 
“they would either of them make as good husbands as 
your favorite would have done with a wife in petto! And 
at all events, Beatrice and Lady Whitebait have taken 
good positions in society — positions to be envied by all 
their acquaintance, and to gratify their mothers’ fondest 
wishes; Violet, on the contrary, as she must be perfectly 
aware herself, with double their beauty, talent, and attrac- 
tions, has done nothing — absolutely nothing! She has 
been immensely admired ; she has made more conquests, 
I have no doubt, than any woman of her years; but men 
will not go and recount their own rejections; other ladies 
will not believe me when I tell them whom she might have 
married — very naturally, too — and all the world knows of 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


253 


her is her devotion to a married man ! I leave it to hei 
own sense to determine whether that is a very advan- 
tageous report to cling to her in circles where women dis- 
like her as their rival, and men whom she has rejected are 
not very likely to be over-merciful in their terms of speak- 
ing of her. Of course it is all hushed when I draw near, 
but I have overheard more than one remark very detri- 
mental to her. In a little time men will become very shy 
of making one their wife whose name has been so long in 
connection with a married man’s, and whose ridiculous de- 
vouement to Colonel Salpretasche has been the most amus- 
ing theme in salons where he has been so famous for love 
not quite so constant I Therefore, I say it is most important 
she should marry soon, and marry well ; and to reject such 
proposals as Prince Carl’s would be madness — a man who 
could wed, if he chose, with one of the royal houses of 
Europe I If you. Lord Molyneux, are so unwise, so ill- 
judging, as to uphold your daughter in such a course of 
folly, I shall do my best to oppose it. A letter of refusal 
shall never be sent to Vallenstein.” 

“Eh I well, I’m sure I don’t know,” said poor Jockey 
Jack, bewildered with this lengthened lecture. “Come, 
Yy, your mamma speaks reasonably — for once ! You know 
I am very much attached to Sabretasche — very much — and 
I admit you don’t see any other man so handsome or so 
accomplished, and all that sort of thing ; and he was deuced 
mad about you, poor fellow I But then, you see, my dear 
child, as long as there’s that confounded wife of his in the 
way, and her life’s just as good as his, he can’t marry you, 
Vy, with our devilish laws; and, ten to one, if ever the 
time come that he can, he won’t care a straw about you — • 
that’s very much the way with us men — and you’ll have 
wasted all your youth and your beauty for nothing, my 
poor pet I You see, Vy, we are not rich, and if you were 


254 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


well married — it’s most women’s ambition, at the least 1 
Oome Yy, what do you say?” 

Violet rose and leaned against the console, with her 
head erect, her little pearly teeth set tight, her lips closed 
in a haughty, scornful curve over them, her face very pale 
— pale, but resolute as Eponina’s or Gertrude von der 
Wart’s — and I think the martyrdom of endurance is worse 
than the martyrdom of action I 

“I say what I am weary of saying — that it is useless, 
and will ever be useless, to urge me to the sin of infidelity, 
which you raise into a virtue because it is expedient ! Let 
me alone ! — it is all I ask. I go into society because you 
desire it ; it is hard that you will persecute me on the one 
subject which is the most painful of all to me. Let me 
alone I — what I may suffer, I never intrude upon you. If 
you wish to be free from me — if I cost you anything you 
grudge — only allow me to work for myself — to go into the 
world where, for your sake, I am not known, and, under 
another name, gain money for myself; I have often been 
told my voice would bring me more wealth than I should 
need. Only give me permission, I will never complain; 
but consent to be given over to Yallenstein, or any other 
man, I will not ! To be sold by you to the highest bidder 
— to be forced into a union I should loathe — to be com- 
pelled to a lie — to worse than a lie, to perjured vows — to a 
marriage that would be infidelity to both ! I know what 
you mean : an unwedded daughter is an expense, and, as 
society counts, somewhat a discredit. If you feel it so, I 
am willing to support myself; if you allowed it, I should 
find no shame in that; but, once for all, I swear, that 
unless God will that I should ever marry him whom I love 
and honor, I will be no man’s wife. If you care nothing 
for my peace, if you will not listen to my prayers, if you 
will not pity me in my trial — at least, you will not seek to 
make me break my oath !” 


GRANVILLE 1)E VIGNE. 


255 


With that strange calm which fixed and hopeless sorrow 
sometimes gives to those who bear it, Violet spoke — on ner 
beautiful face a sighing scorn for those who would make 
her disloyal to him whom they once had sanctioned as her 
husband, mingled with that deep despair, that unspeakable 
tenderness which marked her love, so strong, so mournful. 
On her face was the stamp of that heroism, endurance, and 
power of sacrifice which had lain unseen in her character, 
and which had never been brought out in^ her brilliant, 
glittering, and happy life, till her love had called it up in 
all its strength. It was far above the comprehension and 
the sympathy of those who listened to her, as most things 
high and beautiful, noble and earnest, are above the under- 
standing of the many. To how few of the thousands passing 
through the gas-lit streets of this city to-night do the stars 
above head whisper anything of their poetry, their mystery, 
their solemnity ! 

Jockey Jack rose from his seat, and left the room; the 
girl’s face had touched him; yet he felt it was his duty to 
upbraid her for her folly; but he had not the heart to do 
it, and he felt a choking in his throat, and — true English- 
luan 1 — left the room, ashamed of the emotion which showed 
that all good and generous things were not wholly dead 
within him. And Lady Molyneux was neither touched 
nor softened, having little that was good and generous 
left in her after her intrigues, her liaisons, her cancans, her 
sneers at romance, her study of expediency, her forty years 
of dress and fashionable life, but poured out upon her 
daughter more cruel words — not of hot honest anger, but 
of cold sneering insolence, mockery, and upbraiding — than 
I care to repeat from the lips of a lady of the best ton and 
the most eminent religion. 

It was difficult to wound Violet more deeply than she 
had already done She listened passively; — men and wo* 


256 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


men cannot, like the lama, summon death to their relief 
when their burden grows heavier than they can bear; — she 
listened passively, not deigning to reiterate her resolution, 
keeping down bitter responses with an effort that did her 
honor, solely because she knew it was her mother who 
spoke. When she had finished, she bent her head to her 
and passed out of the room ; a silent rebuke which stung 
her mother into something touching upon shame, or rather 
mortification, for, though she had most words, she felt she 
had not victofy, though she said, and meant it, that before 
long her daughter should w^ed prince Carl of Yallenstein* 
SeidlHz. What would be a broken oath more or less to 
her? Helena Lady Molyneux had broken many in her 
day — many besides her marriage ones I Yiolet found her 
way mechanically into the nearest chamber — the morning- 
room apportioned to her and Alma. Dizzy and deaf still 
with that pitiless avalanche of words, she threw herself on 
a couch — not to weep, her eyes were dry ; but she laid her 
forehead down on the curved arm of the sofa with a low, 
faint cry, as if in bodily pain that had worn out all strength 
— even strength to complain. 

At the ball at Madame de la Yieillecour’s that night 
all beauty paled before hers; men looking on it would 
have given ten years of their lives to win one smile from 
those lovely eyes, to have made one blush glow on that 
pure, colorless cheek; young, unnoticed debutantes looked 
at her as she passed them, with that crowd gathered round 
her which everywhere lingered on her steps, and wished, 
with all the envy of women and all the fervor of their 
years, that they were she — the belle of Paris — that ex- 
quisite Yiolet Molyneux, in whose praise there was not 
one dissentient voice, in whom the most fastidious and 
hypercritical could not find a flaw. If they had seen the 
reverse picture, the Quceu of Society without that crcwn 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 251 

which was so weary a weight upon her aching brows — ■ 
if they had seen her that night, the flowers ofif her luxuri- 
ant hair, the glittering jewels off her arms, kneeling there 
beside her bedside in solitude, which no human eyes pro- 
faned, they would have paused before they envied Yiolet 
Molyneux, courted, followed, worshiped as she was. Ii 
the world went home with most of us, I fear it would have 
sadder stories to tell than the cancans and the grivois tales 
in v,diich its heart delights; the lips that sing our gayest 
barcarolles in society often have barely strength enough to 
murmur a broken prayer in the solitude of their lonely 
hours, when the mask is ofif and the green curtain is down. 

I think it is usually those who have the deepest feeling 
who show it the least to those around, and uncongenial to 
them. The languid air, the absorbed abstraction, the care- 
ess attire, the eyes “in a fine frenzy rolling,’’ belong rather 
to that melancholy which is “only for wantonnness,” that 
sentimentality of sorrow which displays its mourning shield 
with ostentation that courts observance, and lets its sor- 
rows ofif in sonnets and iambics. With strong passions is 
usually strong self-command. No people are more pas- 
sionate, or, for that matter, more demonstrative, than the 
Italians — yet, when they wish, no people know better how 
to smile while the iron is in their soul or the dagger at 
their throat. A school-girl, with a passing cloud on her 
romance-idylls, will sentimentalize by the hour together, sit 
apart with tearful eyes, and publish her misery and her 
martyrdom to the world in general, and to her own choice 
confidants in minute detail. A woman, whose life is 
wrecked by a worthless love or brutal husband, who carries 
a cross on her heart to whic4 the iron-spiked cross of the 
devotee were rest and ease, goes out into the world with a 
smile upon her lips, lest her sadness seen should seem to 
reproach others, who, if cruel, are still dear to her. A 

oo* 


25S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


boy, with lus first sorrow, will wander with woful visage 
and unkempt hair, read Werter and Locksley Hall, parade 
it with a certain pride and pleasure in his own melancholy, 
and spoil a dozen trees with cutting initials on their bark. 
Ten or twenty years later he hides with jealous care the 
curse that gnaws his life-strings — is too weary of the wear 
and tear of grief not to court oblivion of, rather than to 
nurse, his bitter cares; and, if it be some one loved and 
lost, througn whom his life is darkened, he holds it as too 
sacred for the eyes of other men to spy it out shrined in 
the holiest of holies. 

In Alma Tressillian, also, in proportion to the strength 
and fervor of her passion for De Yigne, were the jealousy and 
tenderness with which she kept the secret of that love so dear 
to her. There was a great deal of strength in her character; 
her enthusiasm, her fervent feeling, her imaginative powers, 
her perseverance, her affections, w'cre not only vehement, but 
\hey were strong, deep, and lasting. Alma’s was not the 
ordinary feminine love, warm, but too often evanescent ; it 
wm.s the passion of a woman of vivid brain, fervid affections, 
and impassioned character — with all that childlike and 
frank demonstrativeness natural to her youth, her truthful 
nature, and that candid expression of all she felt and 
thought, in which she had been brought up by Boughton 
Tressillian. If I need to tell you how bitterly she suffered 
during all the months she was with the Molyneux, I must 
have utterly failed in making you understand the char- 
acter of De Yigne’s last love. All her thoughts, sleeping 
and waking, were with him ; not an hour passed but she 
breathed a passionate prayer to Heaven for his life and 
his safety; her heart grew sick, and the blood rushed in 
torrents to her brain with the simplest mention of the 
Crimea. His silence after the reception of her first letter, 
the return of the second in his own handwriting, had shown 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


259 


her that he still disbelieved her — still doubted the love 
that pleaded in such burning accents to him — still held 
her, his own Alma, who worshiped him so singly and en- 
tirely, who for a few brief hours had nestled in his arras 
and listened to his vows — as the false, heartless, fickle, value- 
less, hateful thing, for whom no contempt could have been 
too great, no insult undeserved, no chastisement from his 
hand unmerited. Alma knew him ; she knew the harsh, 
cold skepticism which made him so ready to believe against 
her, and which steeled his heart against her prayers ; but 
though written words might fail to touch him and convince 
him, she felt that together, with her eyes on his, face to 
face, and heart to heart, he would believe her, or he should 
slay her at his feet ; she would never let him go till he 
listened to her story and gave her back his love. Till she 
could meet him, each day, each hour, seemed a cycle of 
time that held her in its iron bonds and would not let her 
free. She had but one aim, one end — to realize money 
sufficient to take her to the Crimea. 

For that one end Alma worked unwearyingly. Just 
before her illness a lady had offered her twenty guineas for 
a water-color of Evangeline finding Gabriel, with a pen- 
and-ink sketch of which she had been pleased when she 
visited Alma’s old painting-room at St. Crucis. To finish 
this picture, a large one, thirty inches by fifteen, Alma had 
given every moment of her time since she had been with 
the Molyneux. She had risen early and had sat late, de- 
clining all the amusement which Violet would have given 
her ; refusing to accompany them in their drives as often 
as she could, consistent with the duties Lady Molyneux 
expected of her, which I can assure you were not lax, and 
might have been almost menial but for Violet’s interfer- 
ence and Alma’s haughty refusal. Toward the summer of 
65 she had nnished it, sent it to the lady, who was a sister 


260 


«RANVIIiLE DE VIGNE. 


of Leila Paffdoff ’s, and chanced to be in Paris at the time, 
and received an order for a companion-picture, the subject 
being left to herself. Greatly to her mother’s annoyance, 
Violet had introduced Alma’s talent into notice among the 
dilettanti of Paris. Many were ready to admire anything 
that would win them favor with the English beauty ; others 
really saw and were struck v/ith (as Sabretasche and the 
cognoscenti in general had been in London) the wonderful 
dash and vitality in her outlines, the delicacy and brilliance 
of her coloring; orders in plenty were given her, more 
than she could have completed in a dozen years, and Alma 
excluded herself from the society into which her own genius 
and Violet’s patronage would have introduced her — society 
at another time so congenial to all the Little Tressillian’s 
tastes and leanings, for she was born to shine and rule in 
society ; and, like all conquerors, male and female, loved 
her scepter and her dais — that she might work, work with 
her art and her hands, and her rich glowing imagination, 
till she had money to take her to the Crimea to tell Sir 
Folko all — to win him back, or die. Poor little Alma I 
how few “ win back” all that makes their life’s glory, what- 
ever stake it be; yet we live — live to the full age of human 
life. When we woo death, he comes not; when we bar 
the chamber-door, then he enters with his chill breath and 
stealthy step. 

It was the beginning of April; the chestnuts of the 
Tuiieries were just thrusting out their first green buds, 
bringing to Alma’s thoughts those chestnut-boughs at her 
old nurse’s home, under whose leafy shadows in the sunshine 
of two summers past she had drank so deeply of that 
fatal cup, whose delirium is more rapturous and whose 
awakening more bitter than the dreams of the opium-eater. 
Her hoard was completed. Never did miser gaze on his 
treasures, never wife on her husband’s ransom, never cap- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


261 


live on the warrant of his freedom, never authoi on the 
darlings of his brain, with fonder rapture, with more grate- 
ful tears, than Alma on the money won by her own hands, 
which was to bear her to him, to Granville, to Sir Folko. 
The thousand miles seemed now but as a span ; love would 
cross all the lands, bridge all the seas, that parted her from 
him. She would go to him, she would find him ; she would 
risk all to see him once again, to kneel at his feet, to swear 
to him she was his, and his alone ; to force him to believe 
her, to wrest from him those words, so fond, so passionate, 
so tender, which she had heard but once, and which her 
whole soul thirsted to hear again, as the dying in the desert 
thirst for one drop from the water-brook to lave their 
parching throats and cool their burning brows. That lie 
could have changed to her never crossed her mind, she 
loved him so faithfully herself! The strength of his pas- 
sion, as it had spent itself upon her in those few short 
hours, had struck answering chords in her own heart; 
she felt how madly, how deeply this man loved her, even 
as she loved him; she suspected change in him no more 
than in herself; that he disbelieved her, that he thought, 
despite all she had told him, that she had fled with Yane 
Castleton, she did believe. All the hard sarcasms, all the 
chill skepticism that she had heard him fling at the world 
and at her sex made her comprehend how he might love 
yet still suspect her, and to \vrest him back out of that sea 
of disbelief, to force him to look down into her eyes and 
there read all the truth, Alma would have braved more 
than a journey across those weary miles which parted her 
from him; and 1 believe that, young, delicate, susceptible 
in some things to terror as she was, her courage, and her 
spirit, and her endurance would have brought her through, 
no matter what danger or privation, till she had reached 
De Vigne. 


2u 


262 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Alma looked at her precious gold that was to take her to 
his side, that was to give him back to her — her lover, her 
idol. At last it was won — won by the head and hand for the 
service of the heart that was chained down, its high thoughts 
clogged, its beating wings fettered, its spirit bruised, but 
never beaten, by the curse of — want of money. It was won ; 
the modern god without whose aid human life may struggle 
ind fall and rise again, and again struggle and again fall, 
and go down at the last — quivering, trembling, dying from 
the unequal fight of right against might, talent against 
wealth, honesty against expediency, for all the world may 
care. It was won ; and not an hour longer should any human 
force keep her from that distant goal whither for twenty 
weary moons her heart had turned so constantly. She 
locked her money in a secret drawer, (she — generous as the 
winds — had grown as careful of that treasure as any hoard- 
ing Dives !) and left her room to seek Yiolet Molyneux 
and tell her she must leave her. A warm friendship had 
grown up between them, not that fond and entire attach- 
ment which, girl-like, they might have felt had they met three 
or four years before, when their thoughts were free from 
care and their hearts had known no passion, but still a 
true affection the one for the other, arisen partly from their 
similarity of fate, of which neither spoke, yet both were 
conscious. It was impossible for Alma not to be grateful 
to Violet for the generous delicacy, the tact, the kindness 
with which she smoothed away all that her mother would 
have made painful in the position of any employee of hers j 
and Violet, with her, escaped from all the worldliness, the 
false-heartedness, the uncongeniality that surrounded her, 
and grew fond of her, as all who knew the Little Tressil- 
lian were wont to do, even despite themselves, won by her 
noble, liberal intellect, her passionate loving heart, her 
winning, impulsive, graceful “ways,” — natural to her as its 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


263 


Bong to a bird, its vivacity to a kitten, its play in the 
evening wind to a flower. Involuntary and unconsciously 
they clung to one another — the two true hearts amid so 
many that were false. 

She sat down in the inner drawing-room. She did not 
see Yiolet, and supposed her to be in her own boudoir, 
where the belle of Paris spent each day until tw'o, denied 
to all, often in penning those letters, transcripts of the 
heart, which were Sabretasche’s only solace through those 
long Crimean nights. 

Suddenly, however, she heard Rushbrooke Molyneux’s 
voice in the outer room; she did not like him, and he 
called her, like Yane Castleton, a “little devil,” because 
when he had admired her beaux yeux blcus, and had tried 
to make such love to her as he thought her position in his 
family warranted, Alma’s hauteur to him, and the keen 
satire with which the little lady knew how to take care of 
herself very well, and to hit hard where she did not admire 
the style of attention paid to her, had annoyed the young 
attache exceedingly, and irremediably wounded his amour 
propre. 

“ Yy, am I a good shot ?” he was saying. 

“You know you are,” answered his sister’s voice; she 
was probably surprised at so irrelevant a question. 

“Yery well; then if you won’t marry Yallenstein — the 
Dashers, you see, are coming home, and as soon as Colonel 
Sabretasche is in England I shall challenge him; he will 
meet me, and I shall shoot him here — just here, Yy — 
where life ceases instantaneously.” 

A low cry of horror burst from his sister’s lips. Alma 
involuntarily looked into the room; she saw that Yiolet 
had started from her brother’s side, her face blanched with 
amazement, and her eyes fastened on him with the fasciua- 


264 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


non and the loathing with which a bird gazes up into s 
snake’s green fiery eyes. 

“Rushbrooke! Great Heaven! you would stain your 
hand with murder?” 

“ Murder ? What an idea ! Dueling is legitimate, ma 
soeur, in this country at least ; and I dare say your lover 
will find his way to Paris, though he is such a ‘man of 
honor.’ Listen to me, Yy; seriously, you must be mad to 
be taking the veil, as it were, for a fellow who can’t marry 
you — for the best of all reasons, that he is another woman’s 
husband. It’s the greatest tomfoolery one ever heard. 
Why shouldn’t you do like any other girl — send this bosh 
of romance to the devil and settle well. Any woman going 
would be wild to have a chance of winning Yallenstein. I 
should say so I lie’s rich enough, I can tell you ; and the 
corbeille he can give his bride, if he likes, will be fit for an 
empress. What the deuce can you object to in him? 
He’s an out-and-out better match than we could have 
looked for; and he’ll be a very facile-going husband, 
Violet; and if you have such a fancy for the Colonel, Yal- 
lenstein will be an easy enough husband after a little time, 
and you can invite Sabretasche to your court ” 

The bitter, unutterable scorn stamped on his sister’s face 
stopped him in his speech. 

“ God help me 1 if my own brother tempt me to double 
dishonor !” 

These words broke from her almost unconsciously. She 
deigned no answer to him, but stood looking at him with 
such loathing and contempt in her lustrous eyes, such 
dignity on her pale features, full of the scorn she felt, 
that Rushbrooke Molyneux, though he was far gone in 
shamelessness, shrank before it. 

But like many such natures, cow'ard at heart, he could 
bully a woman. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


265 


“Well, young lady, will you marry my friend Prince 
Carl, or not?” 

“I have told you once for all — no/” 

Yiolet stood, her head just turned over her shoulder to 
him as she was about to leave the room ; her calm, reso- 
lute, contemptuous tone stung him into irritation. Rush- 
brooke had set his heart on his sister’s becoming Vallen- 
stein’s wife, for certain pecuniary reasons of his own. 

“You are quite determined? Then 1 shoot Sabretasche 
dead four-and-twenty hours after I see him next. Come, 
Vy, choose; the wedding-ring for yourself, or the grave 
for your lover ?” 

He meant what he said — for the time at least. Yiolet 
knew that he was utterly unscrupulous; that in the Bois 
du Boulogne, Rushbrooke, not long ago, had mortally 
wounded a young fellow in one of the regimens de famille, 
for having unwittingly rivaled him at a bal de I’opera with 
a demoiselle little worth fighting about. She knew that 
Rushbrooke was quite capable — if he wished to revenge 
himself on her for not marrying — of doing all he said, 
and more, if he threatened it. Her love for Sabretasche 
subdued her pride ; in the frenzy of the moment she turned 
back and caught both her brother’s hands : 

“ Rushbrooke I are you utterly merciless — utterly brutal ? 
Not to save my own life would I condescend to kneel to 
you ; but to save his I would stoop lower, were it possible. 
But never will I break my faith to him ; I know that this 
moment he would choose murder from you rather than in- 
fidelity from me. If you take his life, you take mine; my 
existence is bound with his — you will scarcely brand your- 
self a fratricide ?” 

Her voice, her face, might have touched a heart of 
Btoiie; but the young attache was rather impervious to 
VOL. II. 23 


26G 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


any feeling at all, being cast much in his mother’s mould, 
fle laughed. 

“ Splendid acting, Yy. You always did act well, though ; 
you played in the Belvoir theatricals when you were only 
ten, I remember. Come, think better of it; marry Vallen- 
stein, and your idol is safe from me. If you boast your 
love is so great, you might surely save the man’s life.” 

“God help me !” moaned Yiolet. 

“Will you marry Prince Carl?” 

“No!” 

“You will ‘murder’ Yivian Sabretasche then, as you 
term it?” 

Another cry burst from Violet’s lips, forced out as from 
a woman on the rack of the Star Chamber or the Inquisi- 
tion. Then she lifted her eyes to him — those lovely eyes 
that the Parisians compared to summer stars — with deep 
dark circles under them, her face full of unutterable an- 
guish, but with a strange nobility upon it. 

“I would rather leave him in God’s hands than yours. 
He will protect him from you I I have told you I will 
never break ray faith to him I” 

“ Yery well ! I will go and have a look at my pistols,” 
smiled her brother, as he rose. 

But Violet’s courage gave way, she fell heavily forward 
on a couch. 

“ My beloved ! my beloved 1 God knows I would give 
my life for yours, but torture me how they may they shall 
never make me false to you, Yivian. You would not 
wish it — you would not wish it, darling — not to save your 
life ” 

Alma could stay no longer; with one bound, like a young 
panther, she was into the room and kneeling beside Yiolet, 
while she turned her beaming, flashing eyes, full of their 
azure fire, upon Violet’s brother. 


GRANVILLE BE VIGNE. 


267 


“ She gave you your right title. Fratricide I You are 
more than that, you are a brute ; and were I of your own 
Bex I would make you feel it, boasted duelist, or rather 
murderer, though you be. What is your sister’s marriage 
to you, that you should seek to force her into a union that 
she loathes ? Prince Carl himself would cry shame on you 
for seeking to win him a wife by such foul means, instead 
of honoring her for her love and truth — love and truth 
such as few men, indeed, are worthy. Go, Mr. Molyneux, 
go, and never come near your sister till you come to ask 
her pardon for your inhuman words and dastard act.” 

With all her old passion, Alma spoke like a little Pytho- 
ness in her wrath ; those dark-blue eyes flashing and gleam- 
ing upon Rushbrooke Molyneux. He, who had never seen 
her roused, was struck with new and far hotter admiration. 
That short-lived passion others was singularly witching to 
men: it had been so to He Yigne, to poor Curly, to Yane 
Castleton; it was so now to Rushbrooke Molyneux. Yet 
she humbled him. He was mortified, conscience-stricken; 
every one of her words brought a flush of shame to his 
cheek, hardened though he was in his early yoiith: and he 
forgot that it was his mother’s dependent who spoke to 
him thus, whom he should have cowed with a word and 
threatened with dismissal. He was only conscious that it 
was a woman more fascinating than any he had ever seen ; 
a woman of nobler heart, of larger mind, of stronger cour- 
age than his own, before whose anger and contempt he 
shrank away ashamed. 

He left the room, murmuring something of Yallenstein, 
his friend — devotedly attached — Yiolet’s unfortunate at- 
tachment — only meant to frighten her, of course — nothing 
more — nothing more. Then he backed out, and Alma 
knelt beside Yiolet Molyneux, honoring her, loving her 
beyond all praise for her steadfast and unshaken love for 


268 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Sabretasche, and Violet threw her arms round her and 
held her close, as though clinging to some human thing 
in her desolation and despair. Then she lifted her face, 
pale, with deepened circles beneath her eyes, and a pain- 
ful tremulousness on the lips, yet with something proud 
and stately in the midst of her anguish: 

“Alma, I have not forgotten your definition of fidelity !” 

The unutterably sad and tender smile with which she 
spoke struck to her listener’s heart; from that hour she 
loved Violet Molyneux with one of the few and fervent 
attachments of her life, and she looked up at her with an 
answering regard that seemed to Violet like an angel 
promise and prophecy for the future : 

“Violet, to those who are thus faithful reward will 
come !” 

Violet tried to smile again, but her lips quivered in the 
effort, and she rose and left the room, while Alma, seizing 
the paper that Rushbrooke had flung down, tore it apart 
with breathless haste, remembering young Molyneux’s 
words, “The Dashers are coming home.” 

It was true; we were leaving at last that land of many- 
glorious and many bitter memories, and Alma read : “ The 
— th Q. 0. Lancers are ordered home from the Crimea, 
and left Balaklava on the 10th, in the transport Eurydice. 
This distinguished corps has played a very prominent part 
in the whole campaign; the gallantry of both its officers 
and men has been conspicuous, and for the dash and daring 
they displayed at the charge of Balaklava the commander- 
in-chief has recommended its commanding officers. Colonel 
Sabretasche and Major De Vigne, to her Most Gracious 
Majesty, with high encomiums. The Emperor and the Sul- 
tan have already forwarded them the Grand Cross of the 
Legion of Honor and the Order of the Medjid, which the 
Queen has graciously accorded them her permission to 


GRaNVILLE de vigne. 


20 ? 


Bccept. Their own countrymen will not be backward ia 
receiving these distinguished soldiers with the honors they 
BO fully merit and have so ably won.” 

How many such paragraphs we read in the journals 
then! Now, as a civilian told me the other day, ^‘the 
Crimea is such a long time ago; nobody thinks about it!” 

No, nobody! — except Curly’s mother and others like 
her, whose hearts are with the gallant dead that lie there, 
and whose every hope on earth was buried under thovse 
rough mounds that are now plowed down by the shRre of 
the Russian serf. 

De Vigne had been much altered since Curly’s death. 
The hot tears that had sprung into his haughty eyes over 
the dead form of his old Frestouhills pet had softened the 
fiery passions, and in a measure thawed the ice gathered 
in his heart. For the first time, despite his resolute and 
willful skepticism, a hope had dawned upon him that Alma 
might yet be true to him through all the circumstances 
that chimed in against her. He was slow to admit it one 
moment, the next he clung to it madly. Absence and time 
had in no degree lessened or cooled the passion that had 
flamed up so suddenly ; on the contrary, with De Vigne’s 
temperament it grew and strengthened, and faithless, 
hollow-hearted, worthless though he believed Alma to be, 
he knew that the sight of her face, the sound' of her voice, 
would rouse him into fiercer madness, more blind love than 
ever. Curly’s words had let in one ray of hope, and be 
cursed the headlong impetuosity which had made him send 
her letter back unopened. There was hope, and some- 
times, as I say, De Vigne strove with all his force to shut 
it out, lest it should break in and fool him once again; at 
others he clung to it as men do to the only chance that 
makes their life of value. Heaven knows that if his love 
for Alma had been error, it brought him punishment 

23 * 


J7a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


euougl Whichever way it turned, he saw enough to 
madden him. If she were false to him, his life would be 
one long and bitter curse to him ; if he had judged her too 
harshly, and his neglect and cruelty had driven her to des- 
peration, and sent her, young, unprotected, attractive as 
she was to men, into the chill world to battle with poverty, 
he shuddered to think what might have been her fate — so 
delicate, so trusting, so easily misunderstood ; if she were 
true to him, across the heaven that opened to him with 
that hope there stretched the dark memory of the woman 
who bore his name. 

Curly had loved her, not so passionately, but more faith- 
fully; Curly had trusted her; Curly had thought how to 
provide for her, and secure her from poverty, no matter 
how low she were fallen ; while he — he had given her up, 
full of his own grief, his own madness — he had left her in 
Yane Castleton’s clutches, when, if true to the trust her 
adopted grandfather had put in him, he would have fol- 
lowed her to save her from her wretched fate, though to 
leave her himself forever; he had believed evil of her, 
while Curly had rejected it, knowing no more than himself, 
but simply from his faith in her, and his belief in her in- 
capability to do anything that was false or wrong. Bit- 
terly De Vigne reproached himself for the mad haste and 
the cruel skepticism which had made him send her back her 
letter unopened. With Curly’s words, “ If ever a woman 
loved man she loved you,” there uprose all the fonder, 
tenderer springs of that passion which he had striven to 
crush out, and of which there had of late only raged all 
the fiercer and more bitter emotions. The sweet wild 
hope, faint though it was, came with a rush of all that de- 
licious happiness which he had tasted during those brief 
evening hours at St. Crucis, and had lately given up every 
hope of ever knowing again. A flood of warmer, softer, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


21 \ 

better feelings awoke in him, in the stead of that narsh, 
cold, cheerless creed that despair and deception naa forced 
upon him. At times he would persuade himself that Alma 
must have loved him, that all those passionate vows that 
her fond words, her still fonder eyes had spoken to him, 
could not have been lies; at others, he would madden 
himself with horrible thoughts of all that must have 
chanced if Vane Castleton had her, an unwilling victim, in 
his clutches; at others, he would sura up together, with 
that strange skill at self-torture in which human nature so 
excels, all the chain of circumstances that seemed to point 
her out as hopelessly, irrevocably false. Chained to the 
Crimea — for De Vigne had much of the spirit of the old 
Greeks and Romans, and he would have construed a sol- 
dier’s duty more like Leonidas of Sparta than like some 
modern militaires — he yet at times longed, as an eagle 
chained longs for its native aerie, to go back to England 
and find Alma once more, no matter how, no matter where, 
but to decide at once the doubt that maddened him — was 
she what he had first thought her, or was she what he 
shuddered to suppose her? Curly’s words had roused him 
strangely, they had melted much of the bitterness, the 
fierceness, the fiery vengeful agony that had raged in his 
soul since that day when he had heard that Alma had flown 
with Vane Castleton. His strong agony of love for her 
had changed as near to hate as his nature, generous and 
inherently forgiving, would allow. If he could have loved 
her less he might have hated her less, but the more time 
rolled on, the longer grew the weary space since he had 
seen that beaming and impassioned face that had wooed him 
so resistlessly and left him so remorselessly, the stronger, 
the wider, the more ungovernable grew that last love of 
De Vigne’s. He loved her, but with the love that slew 
Desdemona, that would have murdered Imogene; a love 


‘272 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


fierce, mad, touchin*^ to bate, that would have periled all 
for one caress of hers, but would have sent her to her 
grave rather than have seen a rival’s hand touch her, 
another’s lips come near her; a love inexorable as death, 
that must have all or nothing. 

But in those long winter nights, tossing on his camp 
bed, Curly’s words, like voices from the grave, recurred 
ceaselessly to him, and as a burst of tears — anguish in 
itself — yet relieves the still fiercer suffering of the brain 
before, so . gentler thoughts of Alma, a ray of hope, a 
gleam of trust, softened and relieved the bitter despair 
and hopeless agony of the past months. He had been 
BO strong in his own strength and he had fallen, surely 
he might have pity on those who had erred — he at least 
might pause before he sat in judgment on another. Was 
his own past so pure, his own life so perfect, that he had 
any right to cast a stone at a woman, even though her 
error and her perfidy had blasted all his life? Sabre- 
tasche — the man who had openly avowed that he had 
little strength against temptation, whom the world as>» 
sorted, and he himself never denied, to give way to every 
wayward impulse, every evanescent desire — had conquered 
himself, had resisted the heaven to gain which he must 
have wooed the woman he loved to that from which when 
she grew older she might wish to retrace her steps; he had 
consigned himself to suffering perpetual rather than lead 
her in her early youth where, later on, she might regret 
and reproach him; a sacrifice the nobler because Sabre- 
tasche was almost certain that the love he had won would 
never change and never turn against him. De Vigne re- 
membered, with a pang, how Sabretasche had said to him, 
“Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall,” and how he 
had retorted, in the pride of his unassailed strength, that 
to win a young girl’s love, bound and fettered as he was, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


272 


would be a blackguard’s act; yet his strength had gon6 
down before his love, and he had forgotten the ties that 
bound him, until, had she been true to him, it would have 
been useless to remember them. De Yigne had not yet 
learned to mistrust his own power .to control himself, de- 
spite the misery which his headlong infatuation for the 
Trefusis had brought on his own head. He had believed 
that he had his passions under an iron rule, because, chilled 
by the deception of his marriage into an intense and unre- 
lenting skepticism of all good in the sex of that woman who 
termed herself his wife, and separated, moreover, from all 
the higher class of women by years of active service in 
India, mingling with and only seeking the society of men, 
he had never been touched into that love which had already 
cost him so much that he had sworn never, again to be be 
trayed by its Judas kiss. Thus, doubly armed by his reso- 
lution never to be beguiled by woman, and by his trust in 
his own honor, which he had fully and firmly believed to be 
a shield all-sufficient between himself and Alma Tressillian, 
he had gone on and on till the passion he had sworn with 
so much scorn to keep free from, all his life through, had 
taken him at an unwary moment, and thrown him as a 
skillful wrestler may throw one who has held the belt, with 
strength too confident and daring too careless, in unat- 
tacked security, for many years. 

As he thought and thought, lying awake with bitter 
memories through those long Crimean nights, De Vigne’s 
bitter and fiery passion, half love, half hate, which, had 
she con5e before him in those moods would have crushed 
her in one fierce embrace and then flung her from him 
forever, lost much of its harshness, its bitterness, and, 
purged from its hatred, yearned toward her with that 
deep, strong love for her which he had poured out so 
»avishly in those fow brief hours during which their hearts 


274 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


had beat as one. He thought more gently, more tenderly 
of her, poor child ! She was so young ! — and if she were 
false, had he always been constant ? and if she had de- 
ceived him, were there not errors enough in his own life 
to bid him not take up the stone to cast at her ? Widely 
tolerant ever, would he be harsh alone to the woman he 
had loved? The thought of her face, her fair young face, 
with its deep-blue, upraised, earnest eyes, and its golden 
waves of hair like netted sunbeams, and its wide-arched 
brow, where intellect and truth were writ so plainly and 
so nobly — of her soft young voice calling him “Sir 
Folko I” and whispering to him those innocent yet im- 
passioned vows of an aifection at once so pure and so 
deep — of those hours before a thought of love came be- 
tween them, g^y and bright with her joyous laugh and 
ringing repartee, and that interchange of graver tastes 
and nobler studies which had had so great a charm for 
him, — all these rose up before him, and drove away all 
harsh and cruel thought of her, and his heart recoiled 
from the fierce and vengeful emotions which had, born in 
love, bordered so close on hate. All that was noble, 
generous, gentle, awoke in De Yigne’s character, and 
there was very much, mingled with those fiery passions 
natural to all strong natures, and that bitter scorn which 
in all nobler ones is aroused by injustice, deceit, and 
wrong. He felt a very anguish of longing to look upon 
her once more; he loved her now with so great a love 
that he could have forgiven her all wrong to him, even 
though that wrong laid a curse upon his life that no 
weight of years could lift from it, no length of time 
efface. He loved her, no matter what she was. And is 
Icve anything short of that? — is love true and real unless 
it says, “However, love, thou art fallen, 1 will not shrink 
from thee ?” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


276 


If she had been false to him, if she had been Yane 
Castleton’s toy for the hour and the plaything of others 
since, he would try to find her, save her, shield her from 
her fate, even though to find her so and to leave her so 
broke his own heart. If she had been true to him and 
others had chicaned her, misled her, taken advantage of 
her youth, her guilelessness, he would find her so ; and no 
matter into what depths of misery she had sunk, he would 
raise her up, avenge her, and if ever his name became his 
own again, give it, with his love and honor, to her in the 
sight of men. Across the darker passions of his soul 
gleamed the Pity and the Pardon he had once had need 
to ask of her. Ilis love grew gentler, nobler, tenderer; 
and the heart so proud, so haughty, so secure in its own 
honor, yet ever so frank, generous, and prompt to justice, 
thought, amid the anguish of those still night-watches, 
“Who am I to sit in judgment on her or on any other 

The order came for us to return home. Sabretasche 
heard it with mingled feelings ; to be free to return to the 
same land with Yiolet Molyneux, to hear of her, perchance 
to see that beautiful face that had risen up before him even 
amid the din and crash and film of impending death at 
Balaklava, brought with it a sudden glow of all those 
warmer emotions which awoke in him, not to make him 
rejoice like other men, but to make him suffer. Yet he 
would fain have stayed there, with the enforced barrier 
of Distance between him and the woman whom fate for- 
bade him. 

De Yigne heard it with a wild rush of hope and fear; a 
stifling horror of dread of all he might learn in England 5 
a tumultuous, rapturous hope, to which he scarce dare give 
life, struggling for pre-eminence ; the great passions of his 
heart striving with each other; all overshadowed with the 
bitter curse that his love for both these women, the two 
arbiters of his life, had brought him. 


‘276 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


At once he longed and dreaded to reach England. If 
Alma had loved him truly, and been misled by Yane Cas- 
tleton’s machinations, De Yigne felt that never could he 
expiate the selfish and skeptic haste with which he had 
condemned her; and already he shuddered at the burden 
of the dread remorse that would pursue him should he 
find that, for want of a strong hand and 'a true heart to 
defend her, that delicate child had fallen into the clutches 
of the man whom his fellow-men, no intolerant judges 
either, had termed Butcher, for his brutality to the women 
he sacrificed and then left to poverty and death I When 
he thought of Castleton and Alma by the new light that 
had dawned on him with Curly’s words, he, strong man as 
he was, and cold as granite as he seemed to others to have 
grown, could have cried aloud in his great sulfering, and 
at the horrible phantasma of what might have been; as he 
tossed through the weary hours of the night, great drops 
of anguish stood upon the brow which had never paled be- 
fore death or danger, and he would awake from his fevered 
sleep, stretching his arms out to her and calling on her 
name, as she had called on his. The excitement and cease- 
less fatigues, dangers, and requirements of the past cam- 
paign had kept him up and carried him on, but now — a 
few more months of the conflict between hope and fear he 
knew would be more tlian even he had strength to bear. 
He would find her, living or dead; he would seek for her 
as Evangeline for Gabriel, even though his heart might 
break at the end of that Pilgrimage of Love. De Yigne 
at last had learnt a lesson that he had never learnt before 
in all his life — he had learnt to love not only for himself, 
but better than himself. 

But at Constantinople — he whom all the army called by 
his Indian sobriquet of the Charmed Life, whom shot and 
shell, death and danger, had alike spared; who had ridden 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


onharmed out of the fatal melee before- the guns of Bala- 
klava, though the last to leave those doomed and death- 
haunted lines ; whom neither cold nor privation had harmed 
ill any way ; who had gone free amid the sickness that, 
struck down his friends and soldiers by the score — at Con- 
Btantinople De Vigne was chained on a sick-bed by the 
bitterest of all our Crimean foes — the cholera. It was 
touch and go with him then; his life was very nearly 
added to those ghastly Returns, which witnessed how much 
noble, gallant, manly human life was lost out there by mis- 
management, red-tapeism, and procrastination. Thank 
God it was otherwise 1 the strength of his constitution 
pulled him through, but it had weakened him to the strength 
of a woman, and the Dashers sailed for England without 
him. I got leave to stay with him. If they had court- 
martialed me, they might have done. I would have been 
cashiered rather than leave the man I loved best on earth 
alone in the Scutari sick-wards in that pestilential place, 
that sounds so poetic and delicious with its long, lovely 
name, its Golden Horn, its glistening Bosphorus, its gleam- 
ing minarets, its Leilas, its Dudus, its bulbuls, and its 
beauty, but is, as all of us can witness, a very abomination 
for a sick'man to dwell in, with its dirt, its fleas, its mos- 
quitoes, its jabbering crowds chattering every lingo, its 
abominable little Turks, with their eternal “Bono Johnny,” 
and its air rife with disease, malaria, and filth. 

Sabretasche would have stayed, too, with him ; the simi- 
larity of fate drew him closer toward De Vigne, as it bound 
Violet and Alma nearer together, and he, fettered to Sylvia 
da’ Cerenci, felt all the warmer attachment, all the deeper 
pity for De Vigne fettered to the Trefusis; those two 
Hecates of their fate, to whom their impetuosity, their 
headlong, unthinking passion, their youth’s thoughtless 
and ill-placed love, had chained them in their older years, 
VOL. II. 24 2« 


278 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


when heart and mind, taste and feeling, led them to others 
80 different. 

“No, no; go to England, Sabretasche,’^ said De Vigne, 
signing the Colonel down toward him in one of his inter- 
vals of comparative ease. “Before long I hope to follow 
you, and you would do me much more service if you would — 
if you could — without bringing her name forward at all, 
learn something for me of ’’ 

He stopped : he could not speak her name without a 
sharp spasm as of severe physical pain. 

Sabretasche bent his head till his lips were close to De 
Yigne^s ear; it was the first time he had heard him allude 
to her throughout the campaign. 

“Of Alma Tressillian he said, softly. 

De Yigne signed him assent, and a silent pressure of 
his hand was bond enough between him and Sabretasche. 
If Sabretasche had been like some eminent Christians 
of my acquaintance, he might have taken the occasion to 
exalt his own superior foresight in prophesying the trouble 
that would be born from De Yigne’s careless intimacy with 
the Little Tressillian; being nothing more than a “bon 
camerade,” with a generous mind, a kind heart, and a gen- 
tleman’s tact, he felt no temptation to do anything of the 
kind. 

The Dashers sailed for England. How few compara- 
tively of the men that had left her shores returned to them I 
Poor Jemmy Pigott had been tumbled into a hastily-dug 
grave, amass of blood, and blue and scarlet cloth, and gold 
lace, and human flesh, after Alma. Monckton had gone 
down at Balaklava, with his last sneer set on his marble 
features as though scoffing at death, never to soften till 
those features should be unrecognizable by friend or foe. 
Little Fan, the youngest cornet in the troop, had been 
left behind in that wild charge of ours; lying across hia 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


279 


kcrfse, struck in two by a cannon-ball, with his sixteen 
years ended, and his gay boy’s laugh hushed, and his girl- 
isn fair curls dabbled in Russian blood. Few enough of the 
•men of ’54 returned in ’56; but what few there were, went 
homeward as cheerily as they had come out two years be- 
fore, (they could not be more so,) save, indeed, their Col- 
onel, whom no home awaited, whom no hope cheered, to 
whom no fond welcome, no tears of joy, no caresses lav- 
ished on him in breathless thanksgiving for all the dangers 
safely past would be allowed to him as to his fellow-men. 
Others went home to England with glad thoughts, fond 
dreams, and happy hours rising before them with the sight 
of those white familiar cliffs ; some to a glad, thoughtless 
life of careless pleasure that would have gained new zest 
from deprivation; others to the revel and the sport, for 
which, blase of them before, the stern realities, and harsh 
but noble trials of those long Crimean winters had brought 
them back their boyish taste; others to the happy English 
home, the bridal vows, the affianced wife’s caress, all the 
sweeter after the perils past, all the dearer because the 
by-gone months had been spent, not in the chase of 
pleasure or the rose-leaves of luxury, but in manly efforts, 
in noble dangers, in the struggle for life and death, in 
the utter absence of all the aids, the pleasures, the 
agreraens, and the surroundings which they, from their 
cradle upward, had been taught to look upon as absolute 
necessities. One man had his racing stud; another, his 
yacht, the pride and darling of his heart; another, his 
young bride, on whose pale lips he had pressed his fare- 
well kiss almost ere the honeymoon had passed ; another, 
his club his lansquenet, his life in London, all he wanted 
or could wish for, since they held all his desires ; another, 
to look into some loving eyes, out of whose depths he had 
seen all liope fade and die by the light of the summer stars, 


280 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


sole witnesses of the parting they had thought might bo 
eternal, — all had something to look forward to and long 
for, save Sabretasche, who had nothing but a love that 
must never be blessed — a fate that bade him not only suffer 
himself, but see, and know, and cause the suffering of the 
woman so unutterably dear to him. 

The Dashers left for England, and De Vigne slowly re- 
covered ; slowly, for his fevered mind retarded the more 
rapid steps the strength of his constitution would other- 
wise have enabled him to take toward more than conva- 
lescence ; convalescence — that state of being which people 
say, and maybe they are right, is desirable and delicious 
when your mind is at peace, your time is of no value, soft 
hands tend you, and sweet voices call you back to the 
Silent Land; but which, to my thinking, is about as ex- 
quisite torture as can be devised, when you grudge every 
moment that flies away and leaves you chained down into 
inaction, while you are longing, as a wounded charger 
hears the din of the battle and longs to rise up and rush 
on and mingle in the fray, to have your old strength back 
again, and to be up and doing what an hour’s delay may^ 
for aught you know, be undoing. This is what convales- 
cence was to De Vigne, and, par consequence, to anything 
better than convalescence he was much longer traveling 
than he would otherwise have been. To the strong man 
to be laid low; for the wayward and haughty will to be 
powerless to rise from that sick-bed ; for the fiery impatient 
spirit to be held down by the weary chain of physical 
weakness — ah I I know it is easy to talk of submission, 
endurance, patience; but under some circumstances phi- 
losophy, under the fetters of illness and debility, requires 
more strength than people dream of or allow until they 
feel it. 

Some three weeks after Ours had got under way for 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


281 


England, I was sitting by De Yigne’s couch reading Co hiiE 
from some of the periodicals my mother had sent me. It 
was Hamley of the Artillery’s “Lady Lee,” which ought 
to interest anybody if a novel ever can ; but I doubt if De 
Vigne heard a word of it. He lay in one position ; hia 
head turned away from me, his eyes fixed on the light rosy 
eastern clouds, his right hand clinched hard upon the bed- 
clothes as though it would lift him perforce from that cruel 
inaction, as it had aided him so many times in life. I was 
glad that a«t that minute an old Indian comrade of his — 
come en route from Calcutta to England via Constantino- 
ple to have a look at the seat of war — was shown into his 
room, hoping that courtesy might rouse him more than 
Hamley ’s lively story had power to do. 

The man was a major in the Cavalry, (Queen’s — 9a va 
sans dire,) of the name of De Vine — a resemblance near 
enough, I dare say, to justify Mrs. Malaprop and Co. in 
thinking them brothers, and the Herald’s Office in making 
them out two branches of the same house. They were no 
such, thing, however; the De Yignes of Yigne reigning 
alone in their glory among the woodlands of the southern 
counties, with their name as clear in the records of a 
thousand years back as the same type of feature is in all 
the portraits ; while the De Yines were a Northumbrian 
race, whose great-grandfather, having made a couple of 
millions by wool, managed to get a baron’s coronet, and 
the Heralds to find him a “De” for his monosyllabic Yine, 
and to his own dismay could trace himself by no manner 
of ingenuity higher up than Henry the Eighth, in whose 
kitchen on dit there was a Jarvis Yine, who played the 
part of scullery-man in real life, but who does admirably 
well to figure in archives as Sir Gervase De Yine, lord in 
waiting on his Most Gracious Majesty. 

This present De Yine — ^a very good fellow, though as 
24 * 


282 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Granville, with his characteristic republican theory and 
patrician leaning, once said with a laugh, he does come 
from below the salt — sat and chatted some time of their 
old S'cinde reminiscences of camp stories and skirmishing, 
and friends dead and gone that they remembered in com- 
mon ; heartily sorry to see De Yigne knocked down as he 
was, and congratulating him warmly on the honors he had 
won — honors for which, in truth, though De Yigne cared 
very little as long as he had had the delight of fighting 
well, and was thought to “ have done his duty,” as gallant 
Sir Colin {Lord Clyde will never be so dear a title to his 
army) phrases it; Granville was too true a soldier to look 
much beyond. 

At last the man rose to go, and had bidden us good-by, 
when he turned back : 

“I say, old fellow, I’ve forgotten the chief thing I came 
here to tell you. This letter of yours has been voyaging 
after me, sent from Calcutta to Delhi, and from Delhi to 
Kohilcunde, and God knows where, till it came to my hand 
about four months ago. I was just going to open it. when 
I saw the g in the name, and the ‘Crimea,’ which the 
donkeys at the Post-office overlooked. You see your cor- 
respondent has put you Hussars, and as I’m in the Hussars 
and you’re in the Lancers, I suppose that led to the mis- 
take. It’s a lady’s writing : I hope the delay’s been no 
damage to your fair friend, whoever she be. I dare say 
you have ’em by scores from a dozen different quarters, so 
tliis one has been no loss. By George ! it’s seven o’clock, 
and I’m to dine at the embaosy. Good night, old fellow I 
1 shall come and see you to-morrow.” 

Scrawled over with the different postscripts and ad- 
dresses so that nothing of the original address was visible 
save ♦he “Major De Yigne,” Alma’s writing was recog 
nizeil by him ere it had left the other’s hand ; almost 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


283 


befoie the door had closed he wrenched it open, and 
turning awdy from me read the many close-\yritten and 
tear-blotted pages that she had penned to him on her 
sick-bed at Montressor’s, — pages teeming with love for 
nim deep and fervent as that he felt for her, bringing 
him the assurance for which he would freely have laid 
down his life, that she was his in heart; his as he had 
loved to think of her, untouched, unspoiled, unharmed by 
any breath of falsehood or dishonor; his own, pure, true, 
safe from any other man’s touch ; unwon by any other 
man’s vows; loyal to him through every trial, his, the 
last love of his life ! Knowing he would wish to read on 
unwitnessed, I left the room. 

lie did read on, and, when he had read all, he thanked 
God, and, bowing his haughty head upon his hands, wept 
like a woman, all the passion, the tenderness, the anguish 
of his heart pouring itself out in that fiery rain of min- 
gling ecstasy and woe, suffering and thanksgiving unutter- 
able. Oh ! that across that golden glory of happiness 
unspeakable, that in that hoar of rapture so pure, so 
perfect, that between him and the joy just won, for which 
his heart went up to God in such trembling, such pas- 
sionate gratitude — between him and the love that was 
his heritage and right as man — there should be the dark 
shadow, that too relentless phantom of his Marriage. It 
is bitter. Heaven knows, to be alone in the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death, with darkness around, with no ray of 
light to guide, no gleam of hope to aid us; but even more 
bitter than that is it to stand as he now stood, the sud- 
den gleam and radiance of a sunshine that he must never 
grasp playing even at his very feet, flooding with warmth 
the air around him, yet leaving him chill, and cold, and 
shuddering, the more because he gazed on life and light; 
It is more bitter to stand as he stood, looking on the 


284 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


glories of a lieaven upon earth which might, which would 
be his if he^ could stretch out his hand to take it; yet to 
look upon it chained to a granite rock ; fettered by irons 
that long ago his own hands had forged ; held by furies, 
the ghosts of his own headlong follies ; denied the heaven 
that opened to his eyes, divided from it as by a great gulf ; 
by the fell consequences of the past; his own passions 
their own Nemesis. 

Would you know the poison that stung him so cruelly 
amid the cup of love so bright, so pure, so precious? It 
was this single passage in that letter of fondest trust and 
fervent words : “ She told me she was your wife, Granville 1 
— your wife ! — that coarse, loud-voiced, cruel-eyed woman I 
But that at the moment I hated her so bitterly for her as- 
sumption, I could have laughed in her face ! I could not 
help telling her it was a pity she did not learn the sem- 
blance of a lady to support her in her role; for I hated 
her so much, for daring, even in pretense, to take your 
name — to venture to claim you. If it was wrong, I could 
not help it : I love you so dearly that I could never bear 
even an imaginary rival. That woman your wife! Not 
even when she told me, not even when she showed me 
some paper or -other she said was a marriage certificate, 
(I never saw one, I cannot tell whether it was at all like 
what she called it,) did a thought of belief in her story — 
which would have been disbelief in you — cross my mind 
for a moment; and when I discovered Vane Castleton’s 
cruel plot, and saw so plainly how this woman must have 
been an emissary of his to try and wean me from you, I 
was so glad that I had never been disloyal to you even 
with a thought. I was so thankful, my own dearest, my 
own Sir Folko, my only friend, my idol ever, tbe only one 
on earth whom I love and who loves me, that even with 
that cruel woman’s falsehood in my ears, I never for au 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


28 t> 

instant credited it; I trusted you too well ever to believe 
that you would have kept such a secret from me. I loved 
you too fondly to wrong you in your absence by want of 
that faith which it is your right to expect and mine te 
give I’’ 

Those were the fond, innocent, noble words that stung 
him more fiercely than any dagger’s thrust, and darkened, 
A^ith midnight gloom, the joy that dawned for him with 
the recovery of his lost treasure— joy in itself so great 
that it was almost pain. This was the wound which that 
soft and childlike hand, that would have been itself cut off 
rather than harm him, struck him so unconsciously, even 
in the very words that vowed her love and gave her back 
to him. This is what chained him, Tantalus-like, from the 
heaven so long yearned for, now so near, but near only to 
mock his fetters, to elude his grasp. De Yigne was way- 
ward, impetuous; he had carried all things before his own 
will; he had sacrificed all things to his own desires; he 
had paid dearly for his passionate impulses — perhaps he 
had made others pay dearly too ; but, whatever errors 
might be in his life, errors of impulse, of headlong haste, 
of haughty self-reliance, De Yigne was utterly incapable of 
betraying trust, and to put faith in him was to disarm him 
at one blow ; where doubt would only have iced, opposition 
only excited him. 

That Alma should trust him thus — that he must stand 
before her and say, “Your faith was misplaced — that 
woman is my wife!” — God help him I his trial was very 
great. 


286 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


PART THE TWENTY-FOURTH. 

I. 

THE WIPE TO WHOM SABRETASCHE WAS BOUND. 

It was April. The first chestnut-leaves of the Tuileries 
were silvered in the moonlight, and the dark Seine dashed 
onward under the gloomy bridges of the city, out under 
the wooded heights of fair St. Germains, where the old 
oaks that had listened to the love of Louise de la Yallihre 
were thrusting out their earliest spring buds. It was a 
fair spring night, and the deep, calm heavens bent over 
Paris, as if in tenderness for the fair white city that lies in 
the valley of the Seine, like one of the gleaming lilies of 
its own exiled Bourbons. Around it, in the grand old 
chase of St. Cloud, in the leafy glades of St. Germains, in 
the deep forest aisles of Fontainebleau, among the silent 
te»'races of Versailles and Neuilly, the spring night lay 
calm, still, hushed to the holy silence of the hour; in Paris, 
thft city of intrigues, of pleasures, of blood, of laughter, 
of mirth, of death ; of gay wit and fiery strife, of coarse 
brutality and exalted heroism; in Paris, the. Paris of 
Mirabeau and Andre Chenier, of Rivarol and St. Just, of 
Marie Antoinette and Theroigne de Mirecourt; in Paris, 
the spring night was full of jests, and laughter, and merry 
?hants de bivouac, while the gas-flowers of Mabille gleamed 
and scintillated, and the Imperial household thronged the 
vacated palace of the D’Orleans, and the light-hearted 
crowd filled the Boulevards and the cafes; and women, 
with forms more lovely than their minds, were feted in 
cabinets particuliers, and the music and the revelry rang 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


281 


out from the Chaumiere and the Chateau des Fleurs; and 
Paris was awake, crowned with flowers, with laug:hter on 
her lips and sparkling in her eyes, gay as a young girl at 
her first ball — gay as she has ever been, even on the eve of 
her darkest tragedies, her most terrible hours. 

The soft spring night came down on Paris. Before the 
cheval-glass in her luxurious bed-chamber, with all the 
entourages of grace and refinement, with bright jewels on 
her hair, and her white cloud-like dress, and her priceless 
necklet of pink pearls, and her exquisite beauty, which 
other women envied so bitterly, stood the belle of its most 
aristocratic reunions — Violet Molyneux; shuddering, even 
while her maid clasped the bracelets on her arm for a ball 
at Madame de la Vieillecour’s, at the memory of those cruel 
.words from her brother’s lips, which bade her choose be- 
tween infidelity or death. At the window of her own 
room, looking up to the clear stars that seemed to gaze 
from their calm and holy stillness on the gay and feverish 
fret of the human life below, Alma Tressillian gazed on 
the spring night, her dark- blue eyes brilliant once again 
with the radiance of joy and hope ; he was coming home — 
her lover, her idol, her worshiped “Sir Folko” — what 
could await her now but a return of that heaven once so 
rudely shivered from her grasp ? Not very many yards off, 
in her crowded and bizarre boudoir, where finery stood the 
stead of taste, and over-loading passed for luxury, the 
Trefusis read the line in the English papers which an- 
nounced the arrival of her law-termed husband’s troop, 
and threw it with an oath to Lady Fantyre, that the Crimea 
had not rid her of his life, and left her mistres-s of the por- 
tion of his wealth that would have come to her — for the 
law would have recognized her rights as his “ wife,” and 
she was in difficulties and in debt. Underneath the win- 
dows, that shone bright with the wax lights of Violet’s 


288 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


toilette-table, stood a woman, once as beautiful as she, but 
now haggard, tawdry, pitiful to look upon, with the stamp 
of a she-devil’s furious temper on her features, begging of 
the passers-by for the coins that would procure her the 
sole thing she now loved or craved — a draught of absinthe ; 
that deadly tempter, that sure, slow, relentless murderer 
who, Jael-like, soothes us for the moment to drive the iron 
nail into our brain while we slumber, and whom, madihan- 
like, we seek and crave and thirst for, though we know the 
end is death. Those four women — how unlike they were I 
Dissimilar as night and dawn ; as fragrant, spotless roses 
and dark, dank, deadly nightshade; as the two spirits that 
in fable and apologue hover over our path, the one to lead 
us to a Gehenna, the other to an Eden ; dissimilar enough, 
God knows. Yet the same stars look down on them, th^ 
same men had loved them, and, in one chain of circum- 
stance, Fate had bound and woven them together. 

That same night Sabretasche arrived in Paris. Rumors 
had reached him of Violet’s engagement to Prince Carl of 
Vallenstein-Seidlitz. Believe them for an instant he did 
not. Though his fate had taught him that delicate and 
satiric sneer at men and women, at the world and its ways, 
which made his soft voice and polished words so keen a 
weapon to strike, he was by nature singularly trustful and 
loyal, and, where he loved, believed, nor allowed hints, or 
doubt, or suspicion to creep in ; nothing but her own words 
would have made him believe Violet had changed toward 
him, and, with those letters of hers breathing such tender 
and unalterable affection, he would have refused to credit 
any second-hand story of her which would have thrown a 
shadow of doubt upon her truth. 

But the rumor of her projected union with Vallenstem 
struck him with a sudden and deadly chill ; he realized for 
the first time the possibility that, one day, if he could not 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


280 


claim Iier, another might; that another man might win 
what fate denied to him. He knew her family was proud, 
and, for their station, very poor; and though he trusted 
Violet’s truth and honor too fully to believe she would 
give her beauty to another while her heart was his — though 
he believed her to have spirit, courage, and fidelity passing 
that of most women — though he knew tliat she would 
never, like some women, find consolation either in a bril- 
liant position or in calmer affections, still — still — he knew 
what Lady Molyneux was. He i^membered women who 
had loved, perhaps, as fondly as Violet, who had gone to 
their husbands’ arms with hearts aching for another; and 
Sabretasche, despite his faith, trembled for the treasure of 
which another man might rob him any moment, and he 
have no right or power to avenge the theft I I know he 
ought to have rejoiced if Violet had been able to have 
found that happiness with some other which he was unable 
to give her — at least, so some roraancists of a certain or- 
der, who draw an ideal and immaculate human nature, 
would tell us, I suppose — but Sabretasche was only mortal, 
as I have often told you, and before we can love quite so ex- 
quisitely I fear we shall have to ostracize love altogether. 
He cares but little for his jewel, who sees it gleaming in 
his rival’s crown and does not long to tear it from his hated 
brows and hide it in his bosom, where no other eyes, save 
his own, shall see its radiance. 

So Sabretasche went to Paris, as soon as his trocp was 
landed at Southampton, to learn what truth or untruth 
there was in this report of Violet’s marriage; to look — if 
unseen himself — once more upon his darling, before an- 
other’s right should claim the beauty once his own. He 
had many friends in Paris, for he had often spent his fur- 
loughs in that fair city, where life is enjoyed so gayly, and 
wit current in its fullest perfection ; and even as he reached 

25 


VOL. n. 


290 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the station, a man he knew — the Marquis de St. Cloud- 
met him, ai]d chatted with him some minutes of the Crimea, 
and of their mutual friends who had fallen at Inkermann 
and the Tchernaya. 

“ One of your compatriotes is the belle of our salons just 
now-,” began M. de St. Cloud, who, having been long ab- 
sent, attached to the French embassy at Vienna, had heard 
nothing of Sabretasche’s brief engagement. “We are con- 
solidating the alliance by worshiping at an English shrine, 
and parbleu ! Violet Molyneux would excuse any folly on 
anybody’s part. You know her, of course, mon cher ? She 
is going to be married to that fool Vallenstein, who has 
gone into as great ecstasies as his German phlegm will 
allow about her jolie taille. However, you will know 
plenty about her before you have been four-and-twenty 
hours here, so I need not bore you beforehand. Ah ! bon 
Dieu, there is my train ! I shall be back in two days. I 
am only going to Vivenne for a bear- hunt. An revoir! I 
shall see plenty of you, I hope, when I return.” 

Away went St. Cloud, in his carriage, and Sabretasche 
threw himself into a fiacre to drive to his accustomed 
locale, the Hotel de Londres. The report was current, 
then, in Paris ; and though he knew that reports are idle 
as the winds, based upon nothing very often, and circula- 
ting their poison without root or reason, still a sickening 
dread came over him; he felt as though, do what he would, 
a thousand mocking fates were leagued together to drag 
Violet from him; and he felt an imperative demand, a 
craving thirst to see her, to hear from her own lips 
whether or no she would be this man’s wife, against 
which he had no strength to contend. He must see her, 
and if she told him she could, without regret or lingering 
pain, wed Carl of Vallenstein, or any other, he would not 
curse her nor reproach her, poor child ! he would hav3 no 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


291 


right to do so, and he would have loved her too well to do 
it if he had ; but he would pray God to bless her, ana then 
— leave her, and never look upon her face again. 

It was nine o’clock — the still spring night slept softly, 
rocked on the boughs of the great belt of boulevard tree? 
round Paris — when Sabretasche, alone, walked from the 
Hotel de Londres to the house where the Molyneux lived 
in the Champs Elysees. He had stayed but a few minutes 
at his hotel ; he had taken nothing scarcely since his choco- 
late at eleven ; he could not rest till he had seen her again — ^ 
his darling, whose fair face had been present to him in the 
silence of those long night-watches, only broken by the 
booming of the Russian cannon; whom he had longed so 
yearningly to see in all those weary months since he had 
parted from her — that terrible parting, on what should 
have been his marriage-day, when instead of his bridal 
caresses he had pressed his last kisses, his farewell to all 
hope, all joy on her lips, that were white with pain as she 
lay fainting in his arms, too dizzy with suffering to be 
wholly conscious of it. 

His heart beat thick with a. very anguish of longing as 
he drew near the house in which she dwelt. A carriage 
stood before the entrance, the door was wide open, the 
hall was bright with its wax-lights, the servants were 
moving to and fro, and in the full glare of the light, 
waiting for the fan she had forgotten, stood, on her 
father’s arm, Violet — Violet, two years before his prom- 
ised bride; and once more he beheld that form, that face, 
that with the din of war and death around had never for 
an hour ceased to haunt him with their surpassing loveli- 
ness. There she stood, unconscious of the eyes whose 
gaze she often thought would have power to recall her 
from the tomb; there she stood, with her white cloud-like 
dress, from whose gossamer folds that slight and perfect 


292 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


form rose, like Aphrodite from the sea-foam; a narrow 
band of gold and pearls clasping her wavy chestnut hair; 
her large eyes darker and more brilliant still from the 
shadow beneath their lids; all that grace and fascination 
and delicate beauty about her which the Parisians merged 
in one word — ravissante ; there she stood, and his brain 
reeled, and his heart beat with labored throbs, and he 
grasped the lamp-post to save himself from falling, as he 
looked upon the woman that he loved. 

As he leaned there in the darkness, holding down with 
iron strength the mad impulse that rose in him to spring 
forward to her, nothing but the dread of shocking her too 
suddenly keeping him back, even in such a scene and with 
such spectators; Violet, taking her fan from a servant, 
crossed the pavement and entered the carriage, still un- 
conscious that in the darkness of the night the life she 
held so dear was beating close to hers ! 

The carriage rolled down the Champs Elysces. Ere the 
door closed, Sabretasche went up to a servant, lounging 
against the portal to talk to a pretty bouquetiere of his 
acquaintance. 

“Oil va t-on?” he asked, rapidly. 

The man — Lord Molyneux’s own man — started as he 
recognized Sabretasche, whom he had known so well two 
years before. 

“Pardon, monsieur I Milor et miladi et mademoiselle, 
vont au bal masque chez Madame de la Vieillecour. Puis-je 
oser dire a monsieur combien je suis bieu aise de le voir 
arrive en bonne sante de la Crimee?” 

“ Merci, Alceste 1” answered Sabretasche, absently ; his 
brain was still dizzy, his pulses were still beating loudly 
with the sight of that exquisite beauty that might nevei 
be his, that might soon be another’s ! 

'' Puis-je offrir a monsieur ?” began Alceste, hesi- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


293 


tatingly, noticiiig the deadly whiteness of his face. The 
question roused him to his old refined hatred of notice or 
publicity, and with a hasty negative he turned, summoned 
a fiacre, and drove back to the Hotel de Londres. As ho 
had entered it first he had met Leoiice de la Yieillecour, 
the Due’s son by an early marriage, who, always accus- 
tomed to see the Colonel come to Paris for pleasure and 
beaux-yeaux, had laughingly bidden him go to see his 
handsome belle mere at her bal masque that night; to 
which Sabretasche, impatient to rid himself of Leonce, 
had given a hasty negative. Now he was as eager to go 
thither, and dressing rapidly, drove to Yieillecour s rooms 
in the Chaussee d’Antin, and asked him to take him with 
him to the Duchess’s ball. Leonce gladly assented, gave 
him a domino and a mask, (it was a fancy of the Duchess’s 
to have it masque ; I fancy her belle position was not so 
all-sufficient for her, but that she was driven to lionneism 
as a divertissement from the stately grandeur that would 
pall sometimes,) and drove him off to Gwen’s palatial house 
in the grim court-yard, among the dead glories of the Fau- 
bourg, lighted up for one of the most brilliant and amus- 
ing reunions of the season, for all the most celebrated and 
beautiful women in Paris were there ; and the mask gave 
it much of the zest, the mechancete, and the freedom of a 
bal de I’opcra — a bal de I’opera where all the revelers had 
pure descents and stately escutcheons, though not, perhaps, 
much more stainless reputations than the fair maskers of 
more “equivocal position,” who were treading the boards 
and drinking the champagne of the opera festivities. 

Not desirous of recognition; only waiting to watch that 
face so unutterably’ dear to him, Sabretasche persuaded 
Leonce to leave him, telling him he was tired, and would 
rather look on tlian join in the conversation, the intrigue, 
the waltz, the smooth whirl, and subdued murmur of the 

aii* 2w 


294 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


society around him. Yieillecour, a man who always al- 
lowed others to please themselves, as he on every occasion 
made a point of pleasing himself, quitted him at his desire, 
and treading his own way amid the courtly crowd of glit- 
tering dresses and dark dominoes, left Sabretasche, the 
best- known man in Europe, the courted lion of both France 
and England, the bel esprit whose wit was quoted and 
fashion followed, whose bow was a brevet of rank to who- 
ever received it, alone in that truest solitude, the solitude 
of a crowd. Had he made himself known, few there but 
would have made him welcome; but incognito, no one re- 
membered him, nor looked twice at the little of his features 
his mask left uncovered, to recollect that they saw Yivian 
Sabretasche — for he had been two years out of society, and 
for any chance of being remembered in society, however 
before it may have courted us, and however we may have 
amused and delighted it, one might as well be lying dead 
among the sands of the Seine or the mud of the Thames, 
as have ceased to have shone in it or been of use to our bons 
amis for two long twelvemonths. Hors de vue hors d’esprit 
is the motto of the great world, which buries its greatest 
hero in Westminster Abbey and its greatest beauty in Pere 
la Chaise, then fills up their places, and thinks no more of 
them in its ebb and its flow from the day when the dust of 
their tombs fell on their coffin- plates I 

Sabretasche was alone in that brilliant crowd where he 
owned so many friends, but where heart, and eye, and 
thought sought for only one his love for whom had dragged 
him hither, to a scene so uncongenial to all his thoughts ; 
but after well-nigh two years^ absence from her, never 
looking on her face save in torturing memory, he would 
not have stayed twelve hours in voluntary absence; to 
breathe the same air with her, to gaze upon her loveliness, 
was better than that utter absence which so nearly and so 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


295 


horribly resembles death that we may well shrink from it 
as from the absence of the grave. 

He moved through the rooms, treading his way through 
the groups of men and women occupying themselves with 
the light love, the exciting intrigue, the laugh, the witti- 
cism, the badinage, which while away such hours for the 
beau-monde — those brilliant butterflies which toil so wearily 
on the treadmill of fashion ; those fair women with such 
soft eyes and such scheming brains. He passed through 
them, and as yet he saw her not; though now and then he 
heard from men as they passed by him praises of her beauty, 
praises which turned his blood to fire, for how could he tell 
but that some of these might be his rivals, one of these be 
some day her husband ? A man as tall as himself, in a 
violet domino powdered with violets in gold, passed him 
quickly; and Sabretasche, gentle though his nature was, 
could have fallen on him and slain him without shrive, for 
jealousy quickened his senses, and, despite his mask, he 
recognized Prince Carl of Yallenstein-Seidlitz, the man 
with whom in days gone by he had drank Johannisberg, 
and played ecarte, and smoked Havanas under the linden- 
trees of his summer palace, little foreseeing that the day 
perhaps would come when Yallenstein would rob him of 
the one once promised him as his own wife. 

He lost the Prince in the crowd ; and still nowhere could 
he find Yiolet, whom his eyes ached with longing to gaze 
u})on again. He caught a fragment of conversation as ho 
passed between a faded beauty and a young fellow in a 
regiment de famille. , 

“ So that English girl is really going to marry poor dear 
Carl! What a dexterity these English have in catching 
the best alliances, though they do forswear marriages de 
convenances, and cry them down with such horror.” 

The young man laughed. “Ah, madame, the English- 


296 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


women are like their country, they boast of a great deal 
which they do not carry out. Yes, La Yiolette Anglaise 
is going to marry poor Carl — so her brother told me, at 
the least, and he has good cause to make that marriage, I 
fancy, for he has lost, pardieu 1 I should not dare to say 
how much, to his future beau frere, and Monsieur le Prince 
is no easy creditor when his treasury is as empty as it is 
just now. 

Sick at heart, Sabretasche moved on — how dare they 
seek to sell his darling to pay her worthless brother’s 
debts I Yet still he trusted her too well to believe that 
any persuasion, coercion, or allurements, would force her 
into a marriage-vow that would be a lie. He loved her, 
therefore he trusted her, through good report and evil 
report. At last he found himself in the ball-room, but 
among its waltzers he failed to find Violet; in her stead 
he saw a certain Countesse de Chevreuil, who, many years 
before, had looked into his beautiful mournful eyes too 
long and dangerously to forget them now, and who, recog- 
nizing him with a quickening pulse, though she was a woman 
of the world, opened a conversation with him that she 
would fain have turned into the same channel as long ago. 
When at last she turned away from him, with a laugh that 
covered a sigh, to a man who would have given a good 
deal to win the softened tone to which the Colonel was 
deaf, Leonce de la Vieillecour dragged him perforce to see 
the Duchess, to speak to Madame of the Crimea and of 
Curly. She bade him welcome with that smile which no 
woman ever refused to give to Sabretasche. 

Gwen Brandling and Madame de la Vieillecour must 
truly have been two different beings, that she could talk 
with scarce a tremor of that terrible death-scene in the 
hospital of St. Paul — talk of it flirting her fan, and glanc- 
ing through her mask with those magnificent eyes, while 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


297 


ihe dance-music rang out in her ears ! Did she really think 
so little of her brother, of the fair child with his golden 
curls and his gleeful laugh, who had played with her under 
the shadow of the lime-trees in their old home, long, long 
years before, when the world and its prizes were no more 
to her than the polished chestnuts lying at her feet, and 
no prophetic shadow foretold to him his dying hour in the 
horrors of Sebastopol ? Did she really think no more of 
him, as she waltzed in that brilliant circle with the arms 
of a royal Prince around her splendid form? Had the 
“belle position” she worshiped so utterly chilled all rem- 
nants of Gwen Brandling out of Madame de la Yieillecour ? 
God knows I I will not judge her. Because there are no 
tears seen in our eyes, it does not follow we are dead to 
all grief. 

The windows of the ball-room, that magnificent ball- 
room, equaling in size and splendor the famous Galerie de 
Glaces, opened at the far end on to a terrace overlooking 
the cool shadowy gardens behind the hotel, with their dark 
yews and cedars, formal alleys, and white ghost-like statues; 
and dropping the curtain of one of the windows behind 
him, Sabretasche stood a moment to calm his fevered 
thoughts. At the end of the terrace, having evidently 
quitted the ball-room as he had done by one of the twelve 
windows that opened on the terrace, stood a woman and a 
man. With all his trust in her, Sabretasche’s heart beat 
thick with jealousy, doubt, and hate, as he saw in the clear 
starlight the white gleaming dress and the jeweled band 
upon her waving hair, which he needed not to tell him that 
the woman was Violet; and beside her, bending toward 
her, was the violet domino of Carl of Yalleustein, his mask 
in his hand, and on his impassive Teuton features an 
fiflgeruess and a glow but very rarely wakened there. 

Xot for his life could Sabretasche have stirred a step 


298 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


from where he stood ; fascinated, basilisk-like, he gazed 
upon the woman he loved so madly, and the man whom 
the world said had robbed him of her, and would soon win 
from her the title by which but two years before he had 
hoped to have called her. He stood and gazed upon them, 
upon the sole thing that bound him to life, the one for 
whom he had suffered so much, whom he would have cher- 
ished so fondly; and upon him, the spoiler, the rival, 
who had stolen from him all he valued upon earth. They 
were speaking in French, and some of their words came to 
liiim where he stood. 

“That is your last resolve?” 

‘'Yes,” answered Violet; and at the sound of that sweet 
and musical voice, whose harmony had been so long silent 
to him, Sabretasche’s veins thrilled with that strange ec- 
stasy of delight which borders so close on pain. “ I am 
not ungrateful, monsieur, for the honor you would do me ; 
but for me to accept it would be a crime in me and a trea- 
son to you. I know — I grieve to know — that others may 
have misled you, and not replied to you at the first as 1 
bid them, and I sought this opportunity to tell you frankly, 
and once for all, that I can never be your wife.” 

“Because you love another!” said Valleustein, fiercely. 

Violet drew away from him with her haughtiest grace. 

“ If I do, monsieur, such knowledge should surely have 
prevented your seeking me as you have now done. I 
should have thought you too proud to wish for an unwilling 
bride.” 

“But I love you so tenderly, mademoiselle; I would win 
you at every risk, and if you give me your hand, I will do 
my best to make your heart mine too -” 

Violet put out her hand with an impatient deprecatory 
gesture. 

“It is impossible, monsieur! Do not urge me further 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


295 


Leave me, I beg of you. I shall never marry. I should 
have hoped my friends had made yon Understand this ; 
since they misled you, there was but one open and honora- 
ble course for me to pursue — to tell you at once, myself, 
that, much as I thank you for the honor you would do me, 
I can never be your wife, nor any other’s. Your words 
only pain me ; you are too true a gentleman to press me 
longer. Leave me, I entreat of you, sire.” 

He was too true a gentleman to press her further; he 
bowed low, and left her; he would not honor her with 
another word of regret, though it cut him hard, for he, 
Carl of Vallenstein, who might have mated with almost 
any royal house in Europe ! — to be rejected by the daughter 
of a poor Irish peer; and as his violet domino floated past 
Sabretasche, Sabretasche heard him mutter, under his 
blonde moustaches, — 

“Que le diable emporte, ce peste d’homme marie!” 

He lifted the curtain of one of the windows, and went 
back into the brilliantly-lighted ball-room; and Sabre- 
tasche was at last alone with the woman he loved so 
utterly, who stood clinching her hands convulsively to- 
gether, and looking up to the spring-night stars, the moon- 
beams shining on her face with its anguished eyes, and the 
costly pearls gleaming above her brow. 

“ Vivian — Vivian, my husband ! — 1 will be true to you — 
] will. Truer than wife ever was I” 

It was a stifled, heart-broken whisper that scarcely stirred 
the air, but it roused a tempest in the heart ot the man 
who heard it. With an irrepressible yearning love ho 
stretched out his arms, murmuring her name — that name 
that had been on his lips in so many dreams, broken by the 
din of hostile cannon. Violet turned, and, with a low, 
faint cry of joy unutterable, sprang forward, and fell upon 
his heart. That meeting was sacred ; unseeu by &:iy eyes 


300 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


save those of the pale calm stars, which watch so mnch of 
this world’s deepest grief and sweetest rapture. For a 
while, in the joy of reunion, they forgot all save that they 
were together — forgot that they met only for fate once 
more to tear them asunder — forgot all, save that he held 
her in his arms with that heart beating against his which 
no man as yet had had power to win from him — save that 
he once more was with her in this life, come back to her 
from danger and suffering, out of the very shadow of the 
valley of death, from under the very stroke of the angel of 
destruction. 

On such a meeting we will not dwell; there is little such 
joy on earth, and what there is, is sacred. As, after a 
dream of the night in which those we have lost live again, 
and the days long gone by bloom once more for us with 
all their sunshine and their fragrance, we awake in the gray 
dawn of the winter’s morning with all the sorrow and the 
burden, the darkness and the weariness, of our actual life 
rushing back upon us, the more dreary from the glories of 
the past phantasma, so they awoke from their joy to the 
memory that they had met only to part again — that they 
had had an interval of rest, given them only like the ac- 
cused in the torture-room, even that they might live to 
suffer the more. 

They must part! If it be hard to part a living mem- 
ber from a quivering human body, is it not harder to part 
and sever from each other two human hearts such as God 
formed to beat as one, and which are only torn asunder at 
the cost of every quivering nerve and every clinging fiber ? 
Heaven knows, few enough hearts in this world beat in 

unison for those that do, to need be parted ! Yet they 

must part; and as the memory of their inexorable fate 
rose up before him, Sabretasche shuddered at the sight of 
that exquisite loveliness condemned for his sake to a soli* 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


301 


tary and unblessed life, desolate as a widow without even 
the title and the memories of a wife. Involuntarily he 
drew her closer to him, involuntarily he murmured, — 

“Oh, my God ! Violet, we cannot live thus !” 

What comfort had she to give him? None. She could 
only weep passionate tears, clinging to him and vowing 
she would be true to him always — true to him, whatever 
chanced. 

, “True to me I God bless you ! But, my darling, worse 
than anything else to me is it to see your young bright life 
so sacrificed,” murmured Sabretasche, with that deep and 
melancholy tenderness wdiich had always tinged his love 
for Violet Molyneux, even in its happiest moment — a 
tenderness which would have made this man whom the 
world, with characteristic keen-sightedness, had called a 
heartless libertine, give up every selfish desire, if by so 
doing he could have secured her happiness, even though 
utterly irrespective of his own. “ True to me I God bless 
you for your noble love I And I have nothing to give you 
in return but suffering and tears — I have nothing to reward 
you with but anguish and trial ! If I could but suffer for 
both — if I could but bear your burden with mine! I 
made you love me ! Oh, Heaven I if I could but suffer 
alone ” 

“No, no,” murmured Violet, vaguely; “not alone, 
Vivian — not alone. What we suffer, let us suffer to- 
gether. You would not have me cease to love you?” 

“My God! no. Your love is all I have in life. And 
yet, if I were not selfish, I should bid you forget me, and 
try to rejoice if you obeyed. Violet, if ever you should” 
— and, despite all his effort, his voice was all but inaudible 
with the anguish and the tenderness be tried to hold down 
and rein in — “if you should think at any time it were pos- 
sible to find happiness with another — if you could go jov- 

26 


vox u. 


302 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


fully to another’s heart — if you fancy you could in other 
loves forget my fatal passion, which would have given you 
every earthly joy had fate allowed me, and has been only 
doomed to crowd your years with suffering — if you ever 
think another love could make you happy, be happy, my 
darling; I will never reproach you. Do not think of what 
J shall suffer; no complaint of mine shall ever trouble you. 
If you are happy — whom I love better than myself — I will 
try and thank God that he has not through me cursed, 
the life dearer than my own, and in time, perhaps, I may 
learn to bless the one who has given you the joy I w^ould 
have ” 

He ceased ; his voice was low and broken ; he could not 
complete his generous speech; the great love in him over- 
powered every other feeling; he could not bid her wed 
another ! Who among us would ask of any man to sign 
his own death-warrant? Who can wonder that Sabre- 
tasche shrank from consigning himself to a living death, 
to an existence hopeless as the grave, with throes of 
mortal agony that would never cease as long as there 
were blood in his veins and vitality in his heart? Violet 
looked up in his face, the moonlight gleaming in her eyes, 
so full of anguish, and on her lips, on which was the smile 
of a love without hope, yet faithful to the end — such a smile 
as a woman might give from the scaffold to one whom she 
would fain comfort to the last. 

“ Do you remember, Vivian, when you first told me you 
loved me, I said I was yours — yours for life and death — 
yours forever? That vow I did not make to break; it ia 
as sacred to me as though it were my marriage oath to 
you. Love, happiness, home — and with another? You 
can know me little, my own dearest, to speak so to me ; 
who, loving you, could care to look upon another, could 
tolerate another’s vows, could think of peace where you 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


303 


were not? Others have tried to urge me to infidelity. I 
never thought you would insult me too. Noble, gener- 
ous, unselfish as your love is, I, your own Yiolet — T, who 
thought once to be your wife — I will be worthy of it, and 
I count sorrow from your hand far dearer than joy from 
another’s !” 

Sabretasche could not answer her; he tried to thank 
her, he tried to bless her for her words, but his voice 
failed him. To have such a heart laid at his feet, and to 
be compelled to reward it only with suffering and trial; to 
have such a love as this given him, and to be forced })y 
fate to live as though he had it notl — to leave her as 
though she were nothing to him, when only grown dearer 
by absence, to part from her was to wrench away his very 
life. His burden grew greater than he could bear. He 
shivered at her touch, at the sight of that eloquent and 
tender loveliness which alternately chilled his veins to ice 
and fanned them into fire. Violet’s nobility and devotion 
tempted him more cruelly than her beauty. Fair faces, 
well-nigh as fair as hers, he had often won in the long 
years before, while he was a man of the world, and she a 
young child playing by the blue waters of Killarney; but 
such a love as hers, never. They might have been so 
happy! if in his early youth he had not wedded — in his 
eager trust, and generosity, and honor — a woman he had 
thought an angel, and who had proved a fiend. They 
might have been so happy I Ah, me! what words in life 
so mournful as that “might have been,” which banishes 
all hope, and speaks of the heaven which had been ours 
if our own folly had not barred us out. Might have 
beenP^ There is no heavier curse on any human life. 

His burden grew heavier than he could bear. With her 
words dawned the ideal of so fair a life ! A life with 
thoughts, and tastes and hopes in unison — a life such as 


304 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


.lis poet’s mind, weary of the hollowness, and satiated 
with the pleasures of the world, had sometimes pictured, 
but never hoped to find — a life of mingled poetry and 
passion, of every refinement alike of mind and sense — a 
life of love so precious, such as the fondest fancy, the 
wildest dream of his earliest days, his softest romance had 
never hoped to win. It dawned before his eyes, it rose up 
before his grasp with all its sweetest glories. The world 
. — the world — what was that to them? he had but to 
stretch out his hand and say to the woman who loved 
him, “Come I” and both might go to a life beautiful as a 
summer’s dream, where love alone would be their world — • 
a world sufficient to them both, for here he dreaded no 
inconstancy from her, and here he feared no satiety for 
himself. 

His burden grew heavier than he could bear. He grew 
more deathly pale; great tearless sobs heaved his chest: 
his head was drooped till his lips rested on her hair; he 
stood immovable, save for the fast thick throbs of his 
heart, and the convulsive strength with which he pressed 
her against his breast. The physical conflicts he had of 
late passed through were peace, rest, child’s play, com- 
pared with this deadly struggle that waited for him the 
first hour of his return ! 

Suddenly he lifted his head. 

“I have no strength for this! Let us go into the 
world. 1 must put some shield between us and this 
torture.” 

He spoke rapidly, almost harshly; it was the first time 
that his voice had ever lost its softness, his manner the 
tenderness natural to him at all times, and doubly gentle 
ever to her. She lifted her eyes to his with one heavy, 
hopeless sigh, and Sabretasche, as he heard it, shivered 
from head to foot. He dared no longer be with her alone, 


GRANVILLE D£ VIGNE. 


306 


and — he led her back into the crowded ball-room. There 
were many masks worn that night at that bal masque of 
the Duchess de la Vieillecour’s ! 

“I wish I were Violet Molyneux,” thought a young girl, 
who, plain and unattractive, was brought to all such scenes 
to sit unnoticed and spiritless. God knows, brilliant belle 
though Violet was, there was little enough to be envied in 
her lot. They who did envy her, little guessed how her 
heart echoed the last words Sabretasche had murmured in 
her ear. 

‘‘Would to Heaven we could die together, rather than 
live apart thus !” 

Violet left immediately ; she told her father she felt un- 
well and wanted rest. It was true enough I Sabretasche 
bad quitted the house at once; he could not be with her 
before the eyes of others, and, standing on the pave, he 
watched her as he had watched her in the Champs Elysees, 
going to her carriage, with all her high-bred and delicate 
beauty — that beauty that must never be his. 

He reproached himself for having given her the torture 
of the past hour. He knew she, like him, would buy their 
meeting at any price of suffering, but he felt the cost was 
too great for her to bear. She endured anguish enough 
in their mutual doom ; and such conflicts as these would 
wear out her young life. Such tempests of the heart as 
they had passed through that night do the work of years 
upon those who endure them. Tender and gentle as he 
was ever over her, thinking of her trial before his own, 
ever williiig to spare her before himself, Sabretasche — who 
felt as if he could never make reparation to her for having 
drawn down on her head the curse of his own fate, though 
he had done so all unconsciously and unwittingly, in igno- 
rance of the chain that dragged upon him — at any cost to 

26 * 


306 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


himself would, had he been able, have spared her, were it 
but an iota of the weight of grief which love for him had 
brought on her young head. He loved Yiolet Molyneux 
with such love as is but very rarely seen among men or 
women I 

He walked along under the silent April stars, heedless 
of where he turned his steps, unconscious to everything in 
that brilliant capital, where he had often shone, the gayest 
and most witty in its fashionable coteries, the most care- 
less and most dazzling in its many revels; unconscious he, 
its once reckless and courted lion, of all but the weary 
burden which it was his greatest grief that he could not 
bear alone. He walked along under tlie calm April skies, 
the air around him sweet with the fragrance of the dawn- 
ing spring, careless of the groups that jostled him on the 
trottoir, from the gay students, chanting their chansons 
boire, to the piteous outcasts whose last home would be 
Mie Morgue; from the light-hearted, bright-eyed grisette 
of the Quartier Latin, to the wretched chiffonnier of the 
Faubourg d’Enfer, stopping to carry rags and filth away as 
wealth. He walked along, blind to the holy beauty of the 
midnight stars, deaf to the noisy laughter of the midnight 
revelers. He walked along, till a shrill voice struck on 
his ear, the voice of a woman, “Limosina per la caritii, 
signor !” 

The language of his childhood, of bis youth, of his only 
cloudless days, of his poet’s fancies, penned in its silvery 
rhythm under the fair skies of Italy, with all a boy’s ro- 
mance and all a boy’s fond hope, while hope and romance 
were still in the world for him, always stirred a chord of 
tenderness and regret in his heart. For his fondest endear- 
ments Italian words rose to his lips, and in his hours of 
strongest passion Italian was the language in which he 
would first and most naturally have spoken. Despite the 


GRANVILLE LE VIGNE. 


307 


chain that Italy had hung upon him, he loved her and he 
loved her language with one of the deep and mournful at- 
tachments with which we love what has cost us heavily, and 
which is yet dear to us. From his musing, that shrill 
voice, with its “ Carita, carita, signor!” startled him with 
a sudden shock. Perhaps something in the tones stung 
him with a vague pang of remembrance, a pang as of an 
old wound suddenly struck in the dark by an unseen hand. 
At any rate, involuntarily, for the sake of the Italian 
words, he stretched out his hand with the alms she begged. 

The face was haggard, faded, stamped with the violence 
of a fiendish temper, inflamed with the passion for drink; 
the eyes red, the lips thin, the brow contracted, the hair 
gray and spare — the face of a virago, the face of a drunk- 
ard. Still, with an electric thrill of memory, it took him 
back to another face, twenty years younger, with delicate 
coloring, smooth brow, coral lips, long shining hair, and 
dark voluptuous eyes — another, yet the same, marked and 
rttined even then with the stain of the same virago passions. 

He gazed upon her, that dim and horrible memory 
struggling into birth by the light of the gas-lamp; her 
bloodshot eyes looked up at him ; and thus, after twenty 
years, Sabretasche and his faithless wife met once again in 
life. 

He gazed upon her as men in ancient days gazed on the 
horrible visage of the Medusa, fascinated with a spell that, 
while they loathed it, held them tight bound there, to look 
till their eyes grew dim and their hearts sick unto death 
on what they dreaded and abhorred; fascinated, he gazed 
upon her, the woman who had betrayed him ; fascinated, she 
gazed on him, the husband she had wronged. They recog- 
nized each other; the tie that had once bound them, the 
wrong that had once parted them, would have taught them 
to know each other, though twice twenty years had parted 


308 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


tnem; he who had wedded and loved her, she who had 
wedded and dishonored him. 

There they stood, in the midnight streets of Paris, face 
to face, once more. They, husband and wife ! They, 
those whom God had joined together I Oh I farce and 
folly and falsehood ! There they stood together. The 
man, with his refined and delicate features, his noble bear- 
ing, his gentle and knightly heart, his generous and 
chivalric nature, his highly-cultured intellect, his fastidious 
and artistic tastes, his proud, poetic susceptibilities, so sen- 
sitive to dishonor, so incapable of a base thought or a mean 
act; and she — the beauty she had once owned distorted 
with the vile temper and ravings of a shrew ; in face and 
form, mind and feeling, the stamp of an unprincipled life, 
a vulgar bias, a virago’s passions, of a conscience dead, of 
a heart without honor, of a brain besotted with the drink 
to which she had latterly flown as consoler and companieu ; 
a creature from whom a passer-by would shrink with 
loathing of the evil gleaming in her eyes ; the type of that 
lowest, most debased, most loathsome womanhood, ruined 
by the worst of passions, drink; from whom, if such 
reeled out before him from a gin palace, or passed him ou 
the pave, he shrank with the disgust of his fastidious taste, 
and the compassionate pity of his gentle and generous 
nature. 

Yet these were husband and wife. Church and law 
bound them together, and would have thought it sin to 
part them I 

She looked up in his face — up into those melancholy and 
lustrous eyes, which seemed to her the eyes of an avenging 
angel, for the last time that they had gazed upon her he 
had flung her from him in self-defense — a murderess in her 
mad and vengeful temper, in her dire hatred of him for 
coming between her and the love that wronged him — the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


30 ^ 


man so young, so fond — the husband who had borne with 
her so unwearyingly, trusted her so generously, who should 
have won, if ever man had a right to win, loyalty and ten- 
derness in return. 

With a stern severity foreign to his nature, Sabretasche 
gazed upon her. All his wrongs, all the memories of that 
betrayal of which he had no proof to give to the world, 
but which had stung and eaten into his very soul — all the 
torture which his tie to this woman had brought on his 
head and on hers who was dearer than his life — all the 
joys of which this wife, so false to him, had robbed him — 
all the happiness which she, traitress to him, denied him, 
with that title which law gave her, but which nature re- 
fused — all the horror, the bitterness, the misery of his 
bondage to this woman, and the separation from the one 
who so truly loved him — all rushed upon him, with a tide 
of fierce and cruel memories, at the sight of the wife to 
whom fate condemned him. His face grew yet paler and 
stern, with an iron bitterness rare with him. Wronged 
pride, outraged trust, violated honor, grief, loathing, scorn, 
pity, an unspoken accusation, which was more full of re- 
proach and rebuke than any violent words, were written on 
his face as, sick unto death, he turned involuntarily from 
her — deeply as she had wronged him, she was sunk too low 
for him to upbraid. With a shudder he turned from her; 
but — with an inarticulate cry and a gurgle in her throat, 
she fell down on the flagstone of the street. Confused, 
and but half-conscious from the draught with which she 
had drugged her thoughts and satisfied the passion which 
had grown upon her, as the passion for drink grows ever 
on its victims, strongly imbued with the superstition of 
her country, while vague and stray remnants of the mira- 
cles, the credulities, and the legends of her religion still 
dwelt in her mind too deep for any crime, or any deadened 


SIO 


GRANV ILLE DE VIGNE. 


conscience, to uproot her belief in them, — the pale stern 
face of her husband, with those dark, melancholy, reproach- 
ful eyes that gazed upon her with a voiceless rebuke that 
touched even her into remorse for the lengthened wrong 
her life had done him, seemed, as he stood suddenly before 
her in the faint, cold light of the moon, as the face of an 
avenging angel beckoning her to the chastisement of her 
crimes; as the face of an accusing spirit come from the 
land of death to summon her to follow him. Debilitated 
and semi-conscious, her strength eaten and burnt away by 
the deadly potence of absinthe, her mind hazy and clouded, 
more impressionable at such times than at any other to the 
superstitions of her creed and country; struck with terror 
at what her weak mind fancied was a messenger of retribu- 
tion from the heaven she alternately reviled, blasphemed, 
and dreaded ; with a shrill cry of horror and appeal, she 
fell down at Sabretasche’s feet a helpless, moveless mass, 
lying still, death-like, huddled together in the cold, clear 
moonlight, on the glistening pavement, before the man her 
life had wronged. 

Sabretasche’s impulse was to leave her there ; to fly for- 
ever from the spectacle of the woman he had once loved 
so fondly, and who had once slept innocently on his heart, 
who was thus lost and thus degraded ; to leave forever the 
sight of a wife who outraged every sense, every delicate 
taste, every noble feeling, but to whom the law still bound 
him, because from a drunkard no divorce is granted ! That 
was his impulse; but pity, duty, humanity stayed it. 
Though she was his enemy, she was a woman; though she 
bad wronged him, she was now in want ; though she had 
forsaken, betrayed, and robbed him of more than twenty 
long years’ peace and joy, she had once been his love. He 
had once vowed to cherish and protect her, and though. 
Heaven knows, she had long ago lost all right or power to 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


311 


appeal to those vows, or that care, he would not leave her 
there, alone in the Paris streets at midnight, lying in the 
kennel like a dog. A crowd gathered round them in an 
instant — round the man with his patrician’s grace and 
beauty, and the woman lying at his feet, squalid and repul- 
sive — all the more loathsome, for the shadow of past love- 
liness that remained, showing all that nature would have 
left so fair, but for the vile human passions that had ruined 
and destroyed it. Among the crowd was a young medical 
student from the Quartier Latin, on his way from the 
Boulfes, who stooped down to look at her as she lay, and 
then raised his eyes to Sabretasche. 

“Monsieur ! regardez comme elle saigne !” 

A dark crimson stream was welling from her lips out or- 
to the pavement, white and glistening in the moonlight. 
With a sickening shudder Sabretasche turned away. lie 
had seen the horrors of the Great Redan ; he had looked 
on suffering and bloodshed with that calmness and tran- 
quillity of nerve which soldiers learn perforce; but a sud- 
den faintness seized him at the sight of that life-stream 
which, perchance, bore with it the last throbs of an exist- 
ence which was the curse of his own. The street faded 
from his view, the voices of men grew confused in his ear, 
the gray moonlight seemed to whirl round and round him 
in a dizzy haze, out of which glared and laughed in mock- 
ing horror the face of a fiend — the face of his wife. His 
brain lost all consciousness; life seemed slipping from his 
grasp; he saw nothing, he heard nothing, he was conscious 
of nothing, save that horrible loathsome face close to his, 
with its wild bloodshot eyes dragging him with her down, 
down, down — away from life — into a vague hell of horror. 

The soft night wind fanning his brow awoke him from 
his swoon ; tne voices around him seemed to bring with 
them a glad rush of free, healthful, welcome life; the ter-- 


312 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


rible phantom of his brain faded away in the clear light of 
the moon, and in its stead came the memory of Violet’s 
sweet, fair face. The truth rushed on him with the ques- 
tions of the medical student as to his own health, the 
young fellow having noticed the sudden stagger with 
which he reeled back, and the deadly pallor of his face, and 
he answered the glance with which Sabretasche asked the 
question his lips refused to put into words. 

“ They have taken that poor woman, monsieur, to the 
Cafe Euphrosyne, to see what’s the matter with her before 
she goes to the hospital. My friend Lafitolle is with her.” 

Sabretasche thanked him for his care, and asked him to 
show him the Cafe Euphrosyne. He longed to leave the 
place, to go where he could run no risk of hearing, seeing, 
coming again in contact with the terrible phantom of the 
night — the phantom that was no spirit-form moulded by 
the fancies of his brain and dissolved in the clear and 
sunny light of morning, but a dark and hopeless reality 
from which there was no awakening. But he knew by her 
prayer, “Carital carital” that she must be in want, pov- 
erty-stricken, and probably, now that he could make no 
more money from her claims on Sabretasche, deserted by 
her brother ; and the heart of Sabretasche was too gener- 
ous, too gentle, too full of knightly and chivalric feeling, 
to leave her, without aid, to suffer, perhaps to die, homeless 
and destitute, in the hospital of a foreign city. 

The Cafe Euphrosyne was a rather low and not over- 
cleanly house in the by-street into which Sabretasche un- 
consciously had wandered, chiefly frequented by the small 
shopkeepers of the quartier; but the people of the house 
were good-hearted, good-natured, cheerful people — a man 
and his wife, with whom the world went very well in their 
owm small part of it, and who, unlike the generality of 
people with whom the world goes well, were very ready 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


31S 


and willing to aid, if they could, any with whom it went 
ill. Their cafe was open, and lighted ; Gringoire Yirelois 
— the young epicier over the way — was giving a supper 
after the Cirque Olympique to his fiancee. Rose Doclu, 
and her friends, and in an inner room the good mistress 
of the house was venting pitiful exclamations and voluble 
compassion on the poor woman whom her bon ami, the 
water-carrier, had lifted on his broad Auvergnat shoulders 
and borne into her cafe, at the instance of M. Lafitolle, a 
medical student. 

There, on a table, lay the once beautiful Tuscan, sur- 
rounded with a crowd — the many curious, the few compas- 
sionate — the life-blood still dropping slowly from between 
her thin ashy lips, her bloodshot eyes closed, her haggard 
cheeks more hollow still from their leaden hue, the hair 
that he remembered so golden and luxuriant now thin and 
spare, and streaked with gray, far more so than her years 
warranted. As Sabretasche drew near the door of the 
chamber a murmur ran among the people that the Eng- 
lish milord knew something of her, and on the strength of 
it Lafitolle came forward to Sabretasche. 

“Pardon, monsieur, but may I ask if you know anything 
of this poor woman, of her family, of where she comes 
from? If not, she shall go to the hospital.” 

The flush of pain and of pride that passed over Sabre- 
tasche’s face, and then passed away, leaving it pallid as 
any statuary, did not escape the young student’s quick 
eyes. 

“No,” he answered, quickly. “Do not send her to the 
hospital. Let her remain here; I will defray the ex- 
penses.” 

He took out his purse as he spoke, and at the sight of 
the gli’^tering gold within it, and the sum he tendered her 
out of it, Madame Riolette, though as little mercenary as a 


VoL. II. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Uik 

woman can be vho lives by the money she makes, thought 
what an admirable thing it is to fall in by fate with an 
English milord, and immediately acquiesced in his wish 
for her to receive the stranger, and listened with the 
humblest respect while he bade her do all that was neces- 
sary, and send for some surgeon, whom the young student 
recommended as the nearest and the cleverest. 

Sabretasche waited there, leaning against the door of 
the cafe, the night wind blowing on his fevered forehead, 
a thousand conflicting thoughts and feelings at war within 
him, till the surgeon who had been brought thither came 
down the stairs and out of the door. As he passed him, 
Sabretasche arrested him. 

“ Monsieur, allow me to ask. Is she — will she ” 

He paused ; not to save his life could he have framed 
the question to ask if hers were in jeopardy ; hers, dark 
with the wrong of twenty years’ wrong to him ; hers, so 
long the curse upon his own ; hers, the sole bar between 
himself and Yiolet. 

“Will she live?” guessed the surgeon. “No, not likely. 
She has poisoned herself with absinthe, poor devil ! I sup- 
pose you found her on the pavement, monsieur? It is very 
generous to assist her so liberally. Shocking thing that 
absinthe — shocking! Bonsoir, monsieur.” 

The surgeon, without awaiting a reply to any of his 
questions, went olF, impatient to return to the ecarte he 
had left to attend his summons to the Cafe Euphrosyne, 
and Sabretasche still leaned against the door-post in the 
still, clear starlight, while the soft, fresh rush of the night 
wind, and the noisy revelry from Rose Dodu’s betrothal 
supper, alike passed by him unheeded. 

His heart throbbed, his pulses beat rapid time, his brain 
whirled with the tide of emotions that rushed through him 
For twenty years he had not seen his wife ; he bad left hef 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


315 


that day when he had flung her from him, in self-defense, 
as he would have flung a tigress clinging to him with its 
cruel grififes, a young and beautiful woman, with the 
rounded form, the delicate outline, the luxuriant hair, the 
rich coloring of youth. As such he had always thought 
of her. In absence we seldom give account for the rav- 
ages of time; and this haggard, wild-eyed woman, with 
her whitening hair, her thin lips, her hollow cheeks, her 
remnant of by-gone loveliness, only just suflicient to render 
more distinct the marks and ruinous touch of years and 
bad passions, and that deadly love of stimulants which 
stamps itself so surely on its victims, seemed to him like 
some hideous caricature or phantom, rather than the real 
presence of his wife. For twenty years his eyes had not 
rested on her, and the change which time had wrought, 
and temper and drink hastened, shocked him, as a young 
child, laughing at his own gay, fair face in a mirror, would 
start, if in its stead he suddenly saw the worn and withered 
features he should wear in his old age. This sudden resur- 
rection of the memories of his youth ; this sudden meeting 
with the wife so long unseen ; this abrupt transition from 
the delicate, fresh, and exquisite loveliness of Violet Moly- 
neux, to the worn, haggard, repulsive face of the w'oman 
who barred him from her, — took a strange hold upon him, 
and struck him with a strange shock; such as I have felt 
coming out of the warm, bright, voluptuous sunshine of a 
summer’s day into the silent, damp, midnight gloom of a 
cavern. And side by side with that face, seen in the glare 
of the gaslight, with that harsh voice and that shrill cry for 
alms, “ Carita ! carita I” and those wild, bloodshot eyes lifted 
to his, rose the memory of the one so young, so fair, with its 
beautiful open brow, and its earnest, impassioned eyes, and 
its soft lips white with pain, and the clinging clasp of those 
fomi nands, and the quiver in that low' and tender voice 


316 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


speaking those noble words, “I count sorrow from your 
hand dearer than joy from any other.” Side by side they 
rose before him, and with a wild thrill of such delirium as 
they might know who, on the scaffold, putting up their 
last prayer to God, and taking their last look of the 
golden sunlight and the laughing earth, see the pardon 
which beckons them to life among their fellow-men from 
the very border of the grave, there came rushing through 
his heart and brain the thought of freedom — the freedom 
that would come with Death I — to banish it he would have 
needed to be Deity, not man. 

He leaned there against the door, his thoughts mingling 
in strange chaos death and life ; at once going back to the 
buried past of his youth and on to the possible future of 
his manhood, when Rose Dodu and her party, brushing 
past him with their light French jests, going homeward 
after their merry supper, roused him back into the actual 
moment, and ere the house closed for the night he turned 
and sought Madame Riolette, to bid her have all that 
might be necessary for the comfort and the care of her 
charge, and wait for no solace that money could bring to 
soothe the dreary passage to the grave of the woman 
whose life had blasted his. Church people, I know, looked 
on Sabretasche as an ame damnee and a l^t spirit — as a 
child of wrath, ungodly, worldly, given over to dissipation 
and skepticism and self-indulgence — yet, if I had wronged 
him, or were in need, I would rather have his reading of 
charity and forgiveness than that of “eminent Christians,” 
though theirs is “doctrinal and by grace,” and his the sim- 
ple offspring of a noble heart, a generous nature, and a 
tolerant mind, which, knowing much evil in itself, forbore 
to avenge much evil in others. 

Madame Riolette listened to his injunctions with the 
reverence with which gleaming Napoleons are sure to gain 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


3n 

for their owner all the world over, and promised to give 
the sufferer every care and comfort — a promise she would 
have kept without any bribe, for she was full of the ready 
and vivacious kindness of her country, and was one of the 
best-natured little women that ever breathed. 

“ Monsieur would not like to speak to the poor woman V* 
she asked, hesitatingly. 

“No, no,” said Sabretasche, hastily, with that flush of 
pain which every thought of his wife brought with it. 

“But, monsieur,” went on Madame Riolette, submis- 
sively, with her little head, with its white cap and its pon- 
derous earrings, hung bashfully down, afraid of seeming 
rude to this English milord, in whom she, with French 
intuition, discerned that ring of “aristocrat,” which she, 
true in heart to the white lilies, reverenced and adored — 
“if monsieur could speak Italian it would be such a kind- 
ness to the poor woman. No one in the house could, and 
since she had become conscious, she kept murmuring 
Italian words, and seemed so wretched no one could un- 
derstand them. As monsieur had been already so nobly 
benevolent to her, if monsieur w^ould not mind adding so 
greatly to his goodness ” 

And Madame Riolette paused, awed to silence by the 
pallor and the set sternness in Sabretasche’s face. She 
thought he was angry with her for her audacity, and began 
a trembling apology. Poor woman ! his thoughts were 
far enough away from her. A struggle rose within him; 
he had an unconquerable loathing and shrinking from ever 
looking again upon the face of the woman who had 
wronged him ; yet — a strange mournful sort of pity awoke 
in him as he heard of her muttering words in their mutual 
language in foreign ears upon her death-bed, and ho 
thought of her young, lovely, as he had first seen her 

27 * 


31S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


among the pale-green olives of Montepulto, almost as 
young, almost as lovely as Violet Molyneux. 

He stood still some moments, his face turned from the 
inquisitorial light of Madame Riolette’s hand-lamp j then 
he lifted kis head : 

“ Lead the way.” 

She led the way up a narrow staircase and along a 
little corridor, and opened for him a door through which 
Sabretasche had to bend his head to pass, and ushered him 
into a chamber — small, it is true, but with all the pretti- 
nesses and comforts Madame Riolette had been able to 
gather into it, and neither close nor hot, but full of the 
sweet evening air that had come in blowing far from the 
olive-groves of the sufferer’s native Tuscany, across the 
purple Alps and the blue mountains of Auvergne, over the 
deep woods, and stretching meadows, and rushing rivers of 
the interior, till it came fresh and fragrant, laden with life 
and perfume, bearing healing on its wings to the heated, 
feverish, crowded streets of Paris. 

Sabretasche took the lamp from the woman’s hand and 
signed her to retire, a hint which. Madame Riolette inter- 
preted by seating herself by the little table in the window 
and taking out her knitting, pondering, acute Parisienne 
that she was, on what possible connection there could be 
between the poor, haggard, wretched-looking woman on 
her bed, and the graceful, aristocratic milord Anglais. 

By the light of the lamp in his hand, Sabretasche stooa 
and gazed upon his wife, as she lay unconscious of his 
gaze, with her eyes closed, and scarcely a pulsation to be 
seen that could mark life from death. He looked upon 
her face, with the stamp of vicious and virago passion 
marked on every line, on the bony, nervous hand that had 
been raised, in their last parting, against his life; the hand 
which bore on its finger the key that had locked the fetters 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


319 


of marriage round and about him with such pitiless force^ 
tlie badge of a life-long bondage, the seal that stamped the 
death-warrant of his liberty and peace, the wedding-ring 
that in the joyous glow and blind fond trust of youth he 
had placed there, with his heart beating high, with all a 
lover’s tenderest thoughts, the sign as he then believed of 
life-long joy and union with a woman who loved him as 
well and as truly as he loved her. He thought of his bride 
as she had looked to him on his marriage morning in Tus- 
cany, fair as woman could ever need to be, with the 
orange-flowers and myrtles gathered with the dews of dawn 
glittering upon them, wreathed among her rich and golden 
hair; he looked upon her now, with the work of twenty 
years stamped upon her face, twenty years of wrong, of 
evil, of debasing thought, of avaricious passions, who had 
lived on the money of the husband she had wronged, to 
spend it in the lowest of all vices, the love of drink. He 
knew nothing of how those twenty years had been passed, 
but he could divine nearly enough, seeing the wreck and 
ruin they had wrought. And he was tied to this woman I 
— if she rose from that bed of sickness, he was bound to 
her by lav/ 1 His heart recoiled with horror and sickened 
at the thought; reason, and sense, and nature revolted, 
outraged and indignant at the hideous truth. He longed 
to call the world that condemned him to such bondage 
around him where he stood, and ask them how they dared 
to fetter him to such a wife, to such a tie; chaining him to 
more horrible companionship than those inflicted who 
chained the living body to the festering corpse, never to be 
unloosed till welcome death released the prisoner consigned 
to such horror unspeakable by his own kind, by his own 
fellow- men. 

As he gazed upon her, the light of the lamp falling on 
her eyes, aroused her from the semi-conscious trance into 


320 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


which she had fallen, weakened by the loss of blood, which, 
though not great, had taken away the little strength and 
power which she had, all vitality and health having been 
eaten gradually up by the poison she had loved and 
courted — poison slow, but ever sure. 

Her eyes unclosed and fastened on him with a wild, va- 
cant stare ; then she covered her face with her hands, and 
cowered down among the bed-clothes in mortal terror, 
muttering trembling and disjointed words: 

“Oh, Santa Maria 1 have mercy, have mercy! I have 
erred, I have sinned, I confess it! Send him away, send 
him away; he will kill me with his calm, sad eyes, they 
pierce into ray soul. I was mad — I hated him — I knew 
not what I did. Oh, Mother of God, call him away ! I 
am ready, I will come to the lowest hell if you will, so that 
I may not see him. His eyes, his eyes. Holy Jesus, call 
him away !” 

Her voice rose in a faint, shrill shriek; the phantasma of 
her brain was torture to her, and in its unconsciousness the 
superstitious terrors of her childhood’s faith rose clear and 
strong as when long years ago she had trembled, little more 
than an infant, to see the (to her) mysterious Host lifted 
above the crowd. She cowered down among the clothes, 
trembling and terror-stricken, before the gaze of the man 
she had betrayed, who, to her wandering brain, seemed 
like an avenging angel to carry her to an eternal abode 
among the damned. 

“Poor soul, poor soul!” murmured Madame Riolette to 
her knitting-needles, “that’s how she’s been going on for 
the last hour. I wish the milord Anglais would let me 
send for the Pere Lavoisier. If anybody can give rest to 
a weary sinner it is he.” 

Sick at heart with the scene, and filled with a mournful 
pity for the wreck he saw before him, Sabretasche tried Ic 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


321 


^alin her with some Italian words of reassurance and com- 
passion ; but the sound of her native language seemed onl^^ 
to excite her more wildly still. She glared at him ; hei 
dark eyes, bloodshot and opened wide, recalliug to him 
their last parting, when they had glittered upon him as 
now, but then with the fire of a tigress and the hatred of 
a murderess. She sprang up with a convulsive movement 
and signed him frantically from her. 

“Go away, go away ! I know you; you are Vivian, my 
husband; you are come from hell to fetch me. I have 
sinned against you, and I would sin again. I hate you — • 
I hate you I Go to your English love I but you can never 
marry her~you can never marry her. 1 am your wife. All 
the world will tell you so, and I will not let you kill me. I 
will live — I will live, to curse you as I have ” 

She sank back on her pillows, her little strength ex- 
hausted with the violence of her passions; her eyes still 
glaring, but half consciously, on him — quivering, panting, 
foaming at the mouth like a wild animal after a combat; 
there was little of humanity, nothing of womanhood, left 
in her — and — this woman was his wife! 

She lay on the bed, her wild eyes fixed on him, breath- 
ing loud and quickly, defiant, though powerless, like a 
wounded tigress, stricken down in her strength, but with 
the fell ferocious instinct still alive within her. Then she 
began again to shrink, and tremble, and cower before her 
own thoughts; and hiding her face in her hands, began to 
weep, murmuring some Latin words of the Church prayers, 
and calling on the Virgin’s aid. 

“I have sinned — I have sinned; oh, Madre di Dio, save 
me ! Fili Redemptor mundi Deus, misere nobis. What 
are the words — what are the words; will no one say them ? 
I used to know them so well. I can remember nothing; 
perhaps I am dying — dying, unconfessed and unabsolved 


S25 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Whcie is Padre Cyrillo? he would give me absolution. 
Let me confess, let me confess, O Santa Maria, before I 
die 

'Now that the one thought of confession and absolution 
had come into her mind, she never let it go; moaning that 
one prayer to the Virgin, she lay less violent and less ex- 
cited, but weeping piteously, and begging for a priest ; a 
priest, poor soul I with that strange belief which Catholics 
and Protestants alike share, if not in the ability of another 
mortal to shrive their sins, in his power to help them rub 
out the dark scores of a long life at the last minute, when, 
frightened by the death that is drawing near, they exag- 
gerate their sins, and yet catch at the feeblest straw to 
save them from them. Weary of the scene whose horrors 
he had no power to soften, heart-sick of the human deg- 
radation before him, Sabretasche turned to Madame Rio- 
lette : 

“Is there no priest you could summon?’’ 

“Oh, yes, monsieur,” answered that good little Catholic, 
warmly. “There is the Pere Lavoisier, the cure of Sainte 
Cecile, and so good a man I He will rise any, hour, and 
go through any weather, to bring a ray of comfort to any 
soul; and he can speak her language, too, for he is half 
Italian.” 

“Send for him,” said Sabretasche, briefly, “and show me 
to another room. You shall be well paid for all your trou- 
ble. I knew your patient in other days ; I intend to remain 
here till the surgeon’s next visit.” 

He spoke more briefly and hurriedly than was his wont; 
but Madame Riolette did not heed it. She would have 
been only too glad to have him always there, provided he 
paid as he had done that night, and ushered him with many 
apologies into the room which had lately witnessed Rose 
Dodu’s fete des fian9ailles. The scent of the air, reeking 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


323 


with stale wine and the odors of the late supper, struck 
on Sabretasche’s delicate senses, so used to refinement and 
luxury that no campaigning could dull or blunt them; and 
throwing open one of the small casements, he sat down by 
the open window, leaning out into the cool, silent street, 
over whose high-pointed roofs the gray dawn was growing 
lighter, and the morning stars larger. He felt a strange, 
irresistible fascination to stay there till he knew whether 
this life would revive to be again a curse to his, or whether 
the icy hand of death would unloose the fetters man refused 
to sever. Yet they were horrible hours — hours of fear and 
longing, of dread which seemed so hideously near akin to 
murder; of wild, delirious hope, which for his life he could 
not have chilled ; horrible hours to him, in which he waited 
to know whether with another’s death existence would 
bloom anew for him, and from another’s grave the flowers 
of hope spring up in all their glories. 

He had bade Madame Riolette, when she had brought 
him some cafe au lait and brandy — for he had taken 
nothing for many hours — to let him know when the sur- 
geon had paid his next visit, and awaiting the medical 
man’s opinion, he sat by the open window, while the soft 
April dawn grew clearer and brighter, and the sparrows 
began to twitter on the house-tops, and the hum of human 
life to awake in Paris. He sat there, for what seemed to 
him an eternity, his nerves strung to tension, till every 
slight sound in the street below him — the taking down of 
the shop shutters, the cry of the water-carriers, the bark 
of the dogs— -jarred upon his brain, and every minute 
passed heavily away as though it were a cycle of time. 
His heart beat fast and thick as a knock came on the 
panels of the door, and it was with difficulty he could 
steady his voice to give the permission to enter. He 
expected to see the surgeon ; instead, he saw the cure of 


324 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Sainte Cecile, a mild, silver-haired, gentle- voiced old mail; 
of whom all Madame Riolette’s praise was true. 

“May I speak to monsieur?” 

“Certainly, mon pere,” answered Sabretasche, to whom, 
from his long years’ residence in Italy, the title came 
naturally. 

“You know the sufferer to whom I was called?” 

Sabretasche bent his head ; evasion of the truth never 
at any moment occurred to him. 

“You are her husband?” 

The blood rushed over his face ; he, the haughty gentle- 
man, the refined patrician, shrank as from the insult of a 
blow from the abrupt question that told him that his con- 
nection with the woman who dishonored his name, who 
cursed his career, who blotted his escutcheon, and had now 
sunk so low that an honest day-laborer might have shrunk 
from acknowledging her as his wife, was no longer a secret, 
but known so widely that a stranger might unhesitatingly 
tax him with it. 

“By whose authority do you put these questions to 
me ?” he asked, with that careless hauteur which had made 
the boldest man among his acquaintance pause before he 
provoked Vivian Sabretasche. 

“By no authority, monsieur,” replied the priest, mildly, 
“except that which commands me to do what I think right 
without regard to its consequences to me. Under the seal 
of confession I have heard the sufferer’s story ; the one her 
life has sinned against is her husband; him she saw this 
night standing by her bedside; him she will never now 
rest without seeing, to ask his pardon. When Madame 
Riolette told me of your benevolence to the poor woman 
who had been found dying in the street, I thought yon 
must be he whom she implores Heaven to bring to her that 
she may sue for his forgiveness before the grave closes 
over her ” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGXE. 


325 


*‘ls she dying?” His voice was hoarse and inarticulate 
as he asked the brief question. 

“Fast; when another night closes in — ^nay, most likely 
when noon is here, she will have ceased to live.” 

Sabretasche turned to the window and leaned his fore> 
head on his arm; the blood rushed like lightning through 
his veins, his breathing was quick and loud, like a man who, 
having borne a weary burden through a long day of heat 
and toil, flings it suddenly aside, and his lips moved with a 
single word, too low to stir the air, but full of inexpressible 
tenderness and thanksgiving — the one word, ‘^ViolelP^ 
Alone he would have bowed his face upon his hands and 
wept like a woman, but in the presence of another he turned 
with that calm and equable gravity which, until he had last 
loved, nothing had had power to disturb. The traces of 
deep and strong emotions were on his face, but he spoke 
as tranquilly as of old. 

“You have guessed rightly ; I am her husband by law, 
though I myself for twenty years have never held, nor 
would ever hold, myself as bound in any way by moral 
right to her. She has forfeited all claim or title to call me 
by such a name. Since you have heard her story — if she 
have told it you as truthfully as those of your creed pro- 
fess to tell everything in their confession — you can judge 
that an interview between one who has caused, and another 
who has suffered from, twenty years of wrong, could be 
})roductive of pea,ce to neither. I have cared for her, 
finding her suddenly ill in tliese streets ; I have sent for 
medical aid ; I have given Madame Kiolette, I now give 
you, full power to do everything that wealth can do to 
soothe and soften her last moments; beyond that, I do not 
recognize her as my wife, and 1 refuse to see again a 
woman who, when 1 left her, would liave sought my life, 
and who, even now, drove me away from her with curses.” 

28 2y 


VOL. II. 


326 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


He spoke calmly, in liis low, sweet voice, but there was 
a set sternness on his face ; compassion had made him act 
jrently to his wife, but it had not banished the haughty 
and bitter wrath which wronged pride and outraged trust 
had ever awakened at her memory or her name. 

“But, monsieur,” interrupted the old cure, gently, “if 
y^ur wrongs are great, death will soon expiate them; if 
her errors to you are many, she will be soon judged by a 
God more merciful, we must all for our own sakes hope, 
than Man is ever to his fellows. I have just administered 
the last offices to her. I should scarcely have done that 
had she been still hardened and impenitent. She repents; 
can any of us do more than that, monsieur? And have 
not all, even the very best, much of which we must repent 
if we have any conscience left ? It is hardly fitting for us 
to sit in judgment on any other, when in ourselves we have 
much evil unexamined and unannealed, and if there were 
no outer checks, but constant opportunity and temptation, 
crime enough in the purest of us to make earth a hell. 
Your wife repents, monsieur. She has something to con- 
fess to you, without which she cannot die in peace, not e /en 
in such peace as she may yet win, poor soul I A word 
from you will calm her, will give her the only comfort she 
can ever have this side the grave. You have very much 
to pardon; but oh, monsieur, when you lie on your own 
death-bed you will thank God if you have conquered your- 
self and not been harsh to her on hers.” 

They were simple words. The cure of Sainte Cecile 
had never had much eloquence, and had been chosen for a 
crowded parish where kind words and good deeds were 
more wanted and better understood than rounded periods 
and glowing tropes. They were simple words, but they 
touched the heart of his auditor, awaking all that was 
gentle, noble, and tolerant in his nature. It was true. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


32t 


What was he, that he should judge ? — what his life, that he 
had title to eondemn another? It was the creed that he 
had ever held in that fashionable world, where men and 
women sin themselves, and redeem their errors by raking 
up scandal and preaching moral sermons upon others, and 
seek to hide the holes in their own garments by hooting 
after another’s rags; it had ever been his creed that tolera- 
tion and not severity was the duty of humanity, and he had 
sneered with his most subtle wit at those who from the 
pulpit or the forum rebuked the sins they in themselves 
covered with their surplices or their robes. Should he 
turn apostate from his creed now, when it called him to act 
up to it? Should he dare to be harsh to this woman, 
simply because it happened to be against himself that her 
errors had been committed ? He wavered a moment, then 
— his sense of clemency and justice conquered. 

“You are right. I have no title to judge her. I will 
see her, if you think it best.” 

And the priest, as he looked up into his face, with iti 
pale and delicate beauty, and its earnest and melancholy 
eyes, thought “ what a noble heart this woman has wronged 
and thrown away.” 


82S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


PART THE TWENTY-FIFTH. 


I. 


RELEASE. 

Alone, Sabretasche once again mounted the narrow- 
staircase — alone, he entered the bed-chamber, and signed 
to Madame Riolette to leave him there — alone, by the 
gray faint light of the dawn, he drew near the death-bed 
of his wife, and stood s4ently beside her. The opiate the 
surgeon had given her in his second visit had soothed and 
calmed her; all the wildness and ferocity of her eyes had 
gone, but the hand of death lay heavily upon her. She 
looked up once at him as he stood there, then covered 
her face with her hands and wept, not loudly or passion- 
ately, but long and unrestrainedly, like a child after a great 
terror. 

“I hear that you wished to see me,” said Sabretasche, 
in that low, sweet, melodious tongue in which, long ago, 
among the orange-trees and olive-groves of Tuscany, he 
had vowed his love-words to her. 

She answered him not, but, still hiding her face in her 
hands, wept with low and piteous sobs; then she lifted her 
eyes to his with a shrinking shame, and suflering, and ter- 
ror, that touched him to the core. 

‘ I have wronged you — I have hated you — I have cursed 
you — I have stood between you and your happiness for 
twenty weary years,” she moaned. “You can never for- 
give me — never — never; it were too much to hope! Y'et 
1 wanted to see you once before I die ; 1 wanted to tell 
you all. Even though your last words be a curse upon 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


359 


me, I should have no right to complain, 1 have de- 
served it.” 

“You need not fear my curse,” answered Sabretasche, 
slowly and with effort, as though speech were painful. “If 
I cannot say I forgive, I am not likely to insult you i.i 
your suffering with useless recrimination. We have been 
separated for twenty years; I am willing not to evoke the 
wrongs and dishonor of the past, but to part in such peace 
as memory will allow.” 

He spoke gently, but with an involuntary sternness and 
a deep melancholy, so deep that it was an unconscious 
reproach, which struck with a keener pang into the heart 
of the woman who had wronged him than violent words or 
fierce upbraiding. She clinched her hands convulsively : 

“Do not speak so gently, for God’s sake, or you will 
kill me I I would rather hear you curse, rebuke, reproach, 
upbraid me; anything rather than those low, soft tones. 
I have wronged you, hated you, lied to you ; robbed you, 
betrayed you, dishonored you; to speak so gently to me is 
to heap coals of fire on my head. I repent — I repent, 
God knows; but, at the eleventh hour, what value is my 
remorse ? For twenty years I have wronged you ; what 
good is it for me to tell you I repent when I am dying, and 
can harm you no longer if I would?” 

Sabretasche was silent; her voice, her gestures, her 
words struck open his wounds afresh. He felt afresh the 
cruel, bitter sting of his betrayal; he thought of Violet, of 
all he had suffered, of all he had made her suffer, and his 
hatred for the woman who ha,d stood so long between 
them flamed up in all its strength. He might have par- 
doned his own wrongs, but the sufferings of the one be- 
loved by him — never ! 

His wife glanced upward at his averted face, and shiv- 
ered at the dark look it wore : 

28 * 


330 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


^‘Madre di Dio 1 you will never forgive me 

He was silent. Again she repeated her passionate 
wailing prayer : 

“Madre di Dio I you will never forgive me 

He glanced at her with a shudder, and a weary sickening 
sigh from his heart’s depths : 
cannot P' 

The words roused the devil in her, which the cure had 
thought those vain “last offices” had exorcised; the stern 
passion gleamed again in her eyes, and she sprang up like 
a dying panther : 

“No! because you love your English mistress. Would 
to Heaven I could live and keep you from her I” 

“Silence!” broke in Sabretasche, so sternly that she 
started and trembled as she heard him. “Never dare to 
pollute her name with your lips ! I came at your request, 
but not to be reproached or questioned. Your own con- 
science must accuse you of the wrong you did me long 
years ago, when I both loved and trusted you. For more 
than twenty years you were content to live upon the gold 
of the husband you had betrayed. For more than twenty 
years you, who had won from me as fond, and true, and 
long-suffering affection as a man could give a woman, have 
been a clog upon my life, a stain upon my name, a fester- 
ing wound in my side, a bar from all peace, all light- 
heartedness, all happiness; and yet because I could not 
prove, you would not even make the only reparation left 
in your power — acknowledgment of the wrong that you 
knew had parted us.” 

“But I acknowledge it now. I repent it now, Vivian. 
No one can do more than that!” 

To the lips of the man of the world rose naturally the 
satire which was habitual. Yes! she confessed and re- 
pented now that life was ebbing from her grasp, revenge 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


331 


no longer possible, and acknowledgment unneeded, as 
people who have played their last card out on earth turn 
frightened, with weakened nerve, to God, insulting Him 
and flattering their priests with “death-bed repentances!” 
and timorous recantations, which they would have laughed 
at in their day of better health and stronger brain ! But 
he was too generous and too merciful to utter the sneer 
which rose involuntarily to his lips to a woman helpless 
and dying, wdio, however bitterly she had betrayed^ him, 
was now powerless to harm. He sighed again, heavily; 
the wretched state of the woman he had once loved struck 
him with keen pain; her suffering, her poverty, her degra- 
dation touched the man of refinement and luxury, from 
whom every jar and chill of the discomfort of a different 
world to his own had ever been sedulously excluded, and 
he could not look on the utter wTeck of what he had last 
seen, perfect in youth and beauty, without deep pity, in 
wdiich his owm hate was quenched, his own wrong avenged. 
He answered her more gently, and very sadly : 

“I did not come here to reproach you. Your con- 
science must know the wrong you did me, and my own life 
has not been pure enough to give me any title to fling a 
stone at you.” 

Well said! Libertine, skeptic, egotist, man of pleasure 
and of fashion, as society called Sabretasche, he could act 
up, even here with his most cruel enemy, to his doctrine 
of toleration. It is more than most do who preach louder 
and with more “orthodoxy!” But Sabretasche did not 
pretend to be a saint; he was simply a man of honor. She 
looked at him long and wonderingly: to the fierce, incon- 
stant, and vindictive Tuscan, this justice simply for the 
sake o/ justice, this toleration, given to her against his 
impulse, merely because he considered it her due, was new 
and very strange. 


332 


GRANVILLE LE YIGNE. 


“You humb.c me bitterly,” she said, between her teeth 
“ But I have sinned ; it is right punishment. I did wrong 
you. I wedded you because I was sick of being caged 
in Montepulto, and because I thought you, as you were, 
rich, generous, and of high birth. I never loved you; 
and when I was alone with you, your attentions teased 
and irritated me, and the solitude you seemed to think 
so like Paradise sickened and annoyed me, till I suc- 
ceeded in making it a Hell. I cared nothing for any- 
thing you cared for ; your love of refinement was a con- 
stant restraint upon me; your poetry of thought and 
feeling a constant annoyance to me. I grew to hate 
you, because you were too high, too delicate in thought, 
too much of a gentleman for me; your superiority jarred 
upon me and irritated me. I hated you for it. I hated 
you even for your affection, your gentleness, your gener- 
osity, your sweet temper, which were so many silent 
rebukes to me. I hated you still more when I loved 
Pulberto Lani.” 

As she spoke her lover’s name, dark loathing and bitter 
contempt gathered over Sabretasche’s face; he thought of 
Lani — coarse, illiterate, low-born, low-bred, as he remem- 
bered him — and felt, fresh as though dealt him but yes- 
terday, the sting of his wife’s infidelity with a rival so 
utterly beneath him. 

“I hated you,” went on the Tuscan, rapidly, with the 
fictitious excited force given her from the opiate; “and 
when, that morning, you surprised him with me, and taxed 
me with my love for him, I would not confess to it, for I 
knew the confession would set you free, and since you had 
once chained me to you I swore you should rue the fetters 
with which we had loaded each other. You left me. Well 
you might! a woman who had betrayed your love, and 
would have murdered you in her fury and her hatred 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


333 


Not long after, Lani left me too; he had only been fool' 
ing me ; he was an idle, worthless, inconstant do-nothing, 
the lover of half the women in Naples, caring for and 
faithful to none. Gran’ Dio I how I hated him! But no 
matter! — that is passed, and the rest you know. You 
know how, yearly, my brother threatened you with ex- 
posure of your marriage, and extorted from you the 
money on which we lived ? That lasted for near twenty 
years. Fepe was extravagant; I lived in such gayety 
and such excitement as Italy could give me, and I sank 
lower and lower every day. I should have disgraced you, 
indeed, if our connection had been declared to your aristo- 
cratic English friends ! I — a drunkard — your wife ! Then 
we heard — for Pepe ever kept a careful watch over you — ■ 
that you loved a young English girl ; loved her more than 
you had done other women ; loved her so that you would 
fain have married her.” 

She was touching on dangerous chords if she wanted his 
forgiveness; his face grew dark, his soft sad eyes stern, a,nd 
he turned involuntarily from her and walked a few paces 
toward the window. 

“When we heard that you were in love with her — Pepe 
soon learnt it ; it was the talk of London — and that you 
were going to the south of France, Pepe, unknown to you, 
followed, and laid in your way the Neapolitan journal with 
the death of my aunt Silvia; he knew it was so worded 
that you would believe I was dead, would deem yourself 
free, and would marry again where you loved. He guessed 
rightly; you engaged yourself to the English signorina; 
then Pepe persuaded me to go to England ; then, as you 
know, thinking to get from you a heavy bribe for silence, 
which would keep him in comfort all his life, he went to 
you to offer, if you married your young English love, 
Uever to betray your connection with us, provided we 


334 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


were paid enough. You refused. We could not under- 
stand your scruples. The signorina would never have 
known that her marriage was illegal, or that another was 
really your wife. You refused, and we were beggared. I 
had no money to go to law against you to make you pro- 
vide for me, as Pepe had threatened. We could bribe you 
no longer, and you went to the war in the East. My 
brother left me to shift for myself as I might; he cared 
nothing for me when he could no longer make money by 
my name, and I was very poor — how poor you cannot 
think, reared as you have been in luxury and wealth. I 
have sunk lower and lower, till you have found me a beg- 
gar in the streets of Paris. I have done you cruel wrong. 
I have given you hate for love, betrayal for trust. I have 
robbed you of money for twenty years; I have stood be- 
tween you and your happiness, and gloried in the curse I 
was to you. I have done you cruel wrong ’’ 

She stopped, panting for breath, exhausted with the 
effort of speaking so long; and Sabretasche stood look- 
ing out of the window at the dawn, as it rose clearer and 
brighter in the fair morning skies. It had been, indeed, 
God knows, a cruel wrong — a wrong that had stretched 
over more than twenty years — a wrong that had stolen all 
peace and joy, not only from him, but from one far dearer 
than himself. 

“ Come here. Come nearer,” said his wife, in faint and 
hollow tones, as the temporary strength that her cordial 
had given her faded away. 

His face was still white and sternly set as he turned 
unwillingly. 

‘‘Look at me !” she moaned, piteously, lifting to his the 
drawn, thin, sallow face, from which every trace of beauty 
had long departed, and as he looked he shuddered. 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


335 


*‘NowcsiT\ you curse me? Can you not feel that life has 
fully avenged you?’’ 

He was silent ; if life had avenged his wrongs on her, he 
felt that it had cursed him for no sin, chastised him for no 
error, since to this woman, at least, he had given, affection, 
trust, and good faith, and htid been rewarded by infidelity, 
ingratitude, and hate ! 

“Say something to me, Yivian,” she moaned, in pitiful 
despair — “say something gentler to me. If you knew what 
it is to die with the curse of one we have injured on our 
heads. Tlie past is so horrible, the future so dark I Oh, 
God ! how hard it is to live only to die thus ! Do not send 
me down into my grave with your curse upon me, to pursue 
me thiough eternity, to hunt me into hell !” 

“Hush!” said Sabretasche, hi^ low soft tones falling 
v/ith a “peace be still!” on the storm of remorse and 
misery before him. “Hush! I do not curse you — God 
forbid— -I tell you my own life is not pure enough for me 
to have any right to condemn you. If I cannot say truth- 
fuhy that I forgive you — at least I will do my best to think 
as gently of you as I can, and to forget the past. I cannot 
promise more.” 

She caught his hands in hers; she wept, she thanked, 
she blessed him with all the excitable vehemence of her 
national character. Weakened by suffering, terrified by 
death, she seemed to cling to but one thought, one hope — 
the forgiveness of the man whose love she had wronged 
from the hour she had stood with him at the marriage 
altar; that fatal marriage altar, so often the funeral pyre 
for all man’s hopes, and peace, and liberty; where, as by 
the priests of old, living human souls are offered up in 
cruel holocausts to a fanatic folly ! 

“I have but one thing more to tell you — I must hasten 
before my strength fails me,” she began, raising herself 


336 


GRANVILLE DE A^GNE. 


upon the pillows — “I want to speak to you, Yivian, of 
my child — your child ” 

“The child of such a mother ! — I can hear nothing upon 
that head.” 

“ Santa Maria ! why ?” 

His slight sarcastic smile curved his lips for a moment; 

“Why? Hare you ask ? How can I tell that she was 
mine ? And even if you assert she is, what sort of woman 
must she be, reared and educated by you and Guiseppe da 
Castrone? You try my patience and my forbearance too 
far. I come here at your desire, I forgive you my own 
wrongs; but do more — be connected again with the past 
curse of ray life, recognize in the slightest way any one of 
the brood that conspired to stain my name, to rob me of 
my peace, and to bribe me to a lie; — give my name or my 
countenance to one bred up under the tutelage of those 
w'ho, shameless themselves, first taught me the sting of be- 
trayal in my youth, and afterward tempted me in my man- 
hood to dishonor — once for all, I tell you, woman, that 1 
will not!^^ 

He spoke with more impatient anger and stern passion 
than were often roused in his gen|,le and indolent nature. 
She had presumed too far on his forbearance ! to try and 
farm on him a daughter of hers, probably Lani’s child, or, 
if his own, one whose education and mode of life must have 
made her low, common, unprincipled, uncultured, such as 
he would blush for, such as he would loathe; — to be asked 
to give to such a one his name — the name that Violet 
Molyneux would take; — roused all that was haughtiest 
and darkest in his nature. She had g#ne too far, and to 
this he would neither listen nor accede. The very thought 
was hateful, abhorrent, loathsome ! 

“She was your child,” the Tuscan repeated eagerly — “I 
Bwear it, and I should hardly perjure myself on my death- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


337 


bed — she was your child I God knows whether she is 
living now or not; I cannot have harmed her, for I have 
not seen her even since she was two years old. I put her 
out to nurse as soon as she was born, in a village near 
Naples, with a peasant-woman, who grew very fond of 
her. Six months after her birth, as you must remember, 
you and I parted, never to meet again till to-night in the 
streets of a foreign city I — we parted ; and when the child 
was two years old her foster-mother brought her to me ; 
she was going far away — I forget where — Calabria, I 
think, and she could keep her with her no longer. She 
was very lovely, poor little thing, but she reminded me of 
you.” 

“Silence!” broke in Sabretasche, passionately. To 
have any link of the hated chain of the past cling about 
him still ; to have any one of this loathsome Tuscan brood 
forced on him now, when death was nigh to relieve him 
from the shame that had festered into his soul so long, 
stung him beyond endurance. The child of such a mother I 
—what had he for her but hatred ? “ Silence I I will not 

hear her name. I will have none of her ; if she press her 
claim on me I will refuse to acknowledge her. Whether 
or no she be daughter of mine, I disown her forever, she 
is dead to me forever. Great God ! is the madness of my 
boyhood never to cease from pursuing me?” 

The dying woman raised herself on her bed with eager, 
trustful haste to speak while yet her brain could serve her, 
while yet her lips could move : 

“But you must hear me — you must! I cannot die in 
peace unless I tell you — she was your child !” 

“My child or not — she was yours, and I disown her; 
my life shall not be shamed by her, my name shall not be 
polluted by her.” 

But hear me ” 


VOL. II. 


29 


338 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“I will not. If slie be mine, I will acknowledge no 
daughter of yours. You have dishonored me enough ; my 
future at least shall be free from you.’’ 

'‘But hear her story — hear her story! You need never 
see her, never know her, but let me confess all to you — let 
me die in peace,” wailed the wretched woman, piteously. 
“ She was your child. Before her birth I never sinned to 
you; I would not lie now, now, on my death-bed, face to 
face with Satan and Hell. She was not like you, for her 
eyes were blue and her hair was golden, and yours are 
dark, but she had something of your look sometimes, some- 
thing of your smile; her voice was a little like yours, too^ 
and — she was your child ! and I hated the very sight of 
her face. She did not like me — how should she 1 I was 
a stranger to her. She was unhappy at the loss of her 
nurse ; she was afraid of me ; I hated her, and I dare say 
1 was cruel to her, poor little child! At that time an 
English gentleman, who was staying in Naples, saw her, 
and took a great fancy to her, as she did to him. His 
own granddaughter, the same age as herself, had lately 
died of typhus fever; she was his son’s child, and the only 
relative of any kind he had left. Alma pleased him very 
much ; he fancied he could trace a resemblance between 
her and his dead grandchild, and, after a time, he offered 
to adopt her, to give her his name, to make her heiress of 
his fortune, and to take her to England to bring her up 
entirely as if she were his own; that she was not so, no 
one would know, for his son’s little girl, whose parents 
were both dead since her birth, had been born in Italy, 
and had never been taken to England. I accepted his 
oiler; I was only too glad to be rid forever of her — she 
made me think so constantly of you, and I hated you more 
bitterly since I had wronged you. 1 let her go, poor little 
child I 1 was glad to be rid of her. I had some sort ut 


GllANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


339 


conscience left, and I could not bear to hear her voice even 
in the distance; I could not bear to see her smile, for she 
seemed to haunt me and reproach me for the wrong I had 
done her father. I let her go with the Englishman ; and 
I have never seen her since. God knows, wherever she 
has been, she has been better than she would have been 
with me. I have never seen her ; but on Christmas-eve, 
at Notre-Dame, a young girl tendered me charity, and I do 
not know, but as I looked in her face something struck me 
as like your child’s — as like what she would be now she is 
a woman. I do not know — it was very vague — but her 
smile made me think of you, and she gave me something 
of that sad, gentle, pitying look with which you had left 
me twenty jears before. I know not how it was — most 
likely it was all fancy — but it made me think of her and of 
you. If I had not sent her from me, I should not be alone 
in ray misery, as I am now !” 

She ceased, and tears rolled slowly down her haggard 
cheeks. All her life this woman had thrown away all the 
human love that had been offered her ; without it her 
death-bed was very cheerless, with but two memories beside 
it — of the husband she had wronged and the child she had 
deserted. 

“You never knew that English stranger, Vivian?” she 
asked, wistfully. 

“ What was his name ?” asked Sabretasche, coldly. His 
own warmer and gentler nature revolted from this woman’s 
cold, undying hatred of himself, and remorseless abandon- 
ment of her child. 

“Tressillian — Tressillian. I remember it, because I 
found, only the other day, the slip of paper on which he 
wrote it for me.” 

“Tressillian 1” repeated Sabretasche, with an involuntary 
start — “Boughton Tressillian! And your daughter’s 
name ?” 


240 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Alma Tressillian ! Good God !” 

And as things long forgotten recur to memory at a 
sudden touch akin to them, he remembered how, the day 
the Molyneux footman had overturned Alma’s pictures in 
Pall Mall, we had noticed her resemblance to his mother’s 
portrait hanging in his drawing-room — how he himself, 
when he saw her at St. Crucis, had observed the likeness, 
too, though, occupied with other thoughts, it had made no 
impression upon him — Alma Tressillian his own daughter I 
Little as he had noticed her at that time, absorbed in his 
love for Violet, now, swift as thought, there came to his 
mind all he had ever seen or heard of her ; he remembered 
his two visits to St. Crucis ; he remembered her extraordi- 
nary talent for art — the genius inherited from himself ; her 
brilliant and facile conversation, which had drawn so many 
men round her at Lady Molyneux’s ball ; Curly’s adora- 
tion of her, the sudden flush of passion which had passed 
over De Vigne’s face when, lying on his sick-bed at Scu- 
tari, Granville had asked him to seek her out, and made 
him promise never to tell her of his marriage ; and he re- 
membered, too, what Carlton had told that night in the 
Crimea, that she was the mistress of Vane Castleton. Was 
it true? Despite her education, her frankness, and her ap- 
parent sweetness and delicacy, had she, indeed, hid unseen 
within her the leaven of her mother’s nature ? Had heart- 
lessness and sensuality and treachery of character been the 
sole inheritance his wife had bequeathed her child ? As 
all these memories and thoughts rushed rapidly and dis- 
connectedly through his brain, she watched the swift 
changes of expression which, like shadows across the earth, 
swept over his face. 

She grasped his arm eagerly : 

“You have seen her — you know her, Vivian? What is 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


511 


she like now? Is she a true, fond, pure- hearted woman, or 
is she like me ? Is she cursed with any of my vile pas- 
sions? If she be, seek her out. For the love of Heaven, 
find her and redeem her from her fate, if to do it you must 
tell her how low her mother has fallen; her mother, who 
loved her less than the very beasts of the field can love 
their offspring.” 

To have told this dying wretched woman of that base- 
less scandal with Yane Castleton, of which he knew no- 
thing, and which all his knowledge of human character 
made him doubt, would have been brutality. He answered 
her gently and soothingly : 

“I have seen her; or, at least, I have seen an Alma 
Tressillian, whom I have always heard was Mr. Tressillian’s 
granddaughter; not much of her, it is true, but sufficient 
to make me think her all that you could wish her to be — a 
‘true, fond, pure-hearted woman’ — all that a mother might 
most long for her daughter to be. Will you swear to me 
before God that she was my child ?” 

With something of her old national vehemence — that 
vehemence of expression which Alma had inherited from 
her — the Tuscan kissed the little ebony crucifix that 
Madame Riolette had placed before her : 

“I swear it, Vivian, as I hope for pardon for my sins 
from that God whom my whole life has outraged !” 

Sabretasche silently bowed his head. He knew that 
though she might have lied to him the moment before, she 
would not have dared to swear a falsehood to him by that 
symbol, which her Church had taught her to hold so sacred ; 
and though at another hour he would have smiled at the 
superstition which made an oath sacred, where, what he 
tield most binding, honor, would have been broken ruth- 
lessly, something, despite all his wrongs, touched him 
painfully in these hopeless last hours of the woman whom 

29 * 2z 


S42 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


he once had loved, and who had been his bride in that 
warm, glad, brilliant, poetic youth — that youth which she 
had quenched and ruined with the bitterness of betrayal 
and bound with the curse of iron chains. 

She asked one more question : 

“Where did you see her, Yivian?’^ 

“ Twice at her own home, and once at a ball at the 
house of one of our English nobles.” 

“And was she happy ?” 

“She seemed so.” 

“ Thank God I You will never tell her about me — never 
mention me to her — never let her know that the mother 
who neglected her fell so low and vile that she was a 
beggar in the streets — a thing whom she passed by with a 
dole of charity, with a pitying shudder? Never tell her. 
Promise me you will not. Why should she hear of me, 
only to know that I first hated and then disgraced her? 
Promise me, Vivian I” 

“I promise !” 

Little as she could understand him, she knew him too 
«rell to exact an oath from him. 

She looked at him wistfully : 

“Vivian, you are very noble. You shame me far more 
with your goodness than you could do with curses and re- 
proaches.” 

“No,” answered Sabretasche, gently. “Not so. I 
have no claim to virtue. My life has been far too full of 
errors and self-indulgence for me to have title left to give 
me right to condemn another. If you have sinned, so have 
I. No human beings are spotless enough to judge each 
other. As for curses, God forbid 1 They would be ran- 
corous, indeed, to follow you to the grave.” 

She gave a weary sigh. What she said was true ; his 
forgiveness humbled and shamed her more than any up- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


343 


braidings. Then her eyes closed, and she lay quite still. 
All the extraneous strength and vigor given her by the 
cordial which the surgeon had administered in his last visit 
had died away. She lay quite still, her breathing short 
and weak, her brow contracted, her limbs exhausted and 
powerless, the hand of death heavy upon her, her bps 
apart, her cheeks gray and hollow, her brain confused, and 
weighed down with the cloudy thoughts, and memories, 
and fears that haunted her last hours. 

She lay quite still, and Sabretasche stood beside her, 
thinking of that strange accident which had led him to the 
death-bed of the woman who had made all the misery of 
his life ; of that cruel and inexorable tie which had bound 
him for so long to one so utterly repugnant to every better 
taste and every nobler feeling; of the deep, unsolved prob- 
lem of human nature; that book written in such different 
language for every reader, that it is little marvel that 
every man thinks his own the universal tongue, and fails even 
to spell out his brother’s translation of it. This woman 
had hated him ; he had loathed her : they had been bound 
by a tie the world chose to call indissoluble ; they had been 
parted by a fierce and ineffaceable wrong; after twenty 
years’ severance, what could this man and woman, once 
connected by the closest tie, once parted by the hottest pas- 
sions, know of each other? what could they read of each 
other’s heart ? what could they ‘tell or understand of each 
other’s temptations, sufferings, and errors? And yet 
Church and Law had bound them together, till Death, 
more powerful and more kindly than their fellow-men, 
should come to the rescue and release them ! 

That lifelong union of Marriage! Verily, to enter into 
it, It needs a great and an abiding love. With human na- 
ture such as it now is on earth, the angel that man or 
woman clasps so tight, and hopes will bless them, is very 


344 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


like to curse them ere they can let go their hold; and the 
vow they imagined they could take for all eternity, they 
soon tremble to think chains them in the presence of a 
deadly Lamia whom they deemed an angelic Beatrice, even 
for so short a span as a frail mortal life. 

So he stood watching beside his dying wife. A future, 
fond and radiant, beckoned to him in the soft sweet haze 
of coming years ; yet, ere he turned to it, he paused a mo- 
ment to look back to the past, to its sorrow, its sin, its 
trial, its conflict; to her, the bride of his trusting and gen- 
erous youth, the foe of his manhood, whose sting had fes- 
tered in his heart for these long twenty years. And with 
a new-born and unutterable happiness trembling in him, a 
gentle and saddened pity stole over him for the broken 
wreck of humanity that lay palpitating its last feeble life- 
throbs before his eyes ; and every harsh thought, all hatred, 
resentment, and scorn faded away, quenched in deep and 
unspeakable pity. If his character had been hers, his im- 
pulses, opportunities, education, temptation, hers, how 
could he tell but what his sins had been like hers also ? 
They were such, indeed, to him, whose natural bias was 
generosity, and dearest idol honor, as seemed darkest 
and most loathsome; but in that dying chamber Sabre- 
tasche bowed his head, and turned his eyes from them. 
Just and tolerant to the last, he held it not his office 
to condemn — now, above* all, when Death came as his 
avenger. 

So he stood and watched beside his dying wife, the 
woman who had wedded him only to emancipate herself 
from an irksome village home, who had hated, wronged, 
betrayed him, and who had been for twenty years a ruth- 
less barrier between himself and peace — stood and watched 
her, while without the bright morning light dawned in the 
eastern skies, and the song of the birds made swecr music 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


345 


beneath the eaves, and the soft western winds swept in 
through the casement into the chamber of the dying; — 
herald of the Life born for him and come to him out of 
Death. Suddenly her eyes unclosed with a vague, lifeless 
stare, and she awoke to semi-consciousness as the bells of 
Notre-Dame chimed the hour of seven — awoke startled, 
dreamy, delirious. 

“ Hark I there is the vesper-bell. What is it — a saluta- 
tion to the Virgin ? Ah ! I remember we used to gather 
the lilies and the orange-flowers to dress up the high altar; 
that was in Italy — poor Italy. I wish I could go there 
once — just once before I die, to see the vineyards, and the 
wheat-fields, and the olive-groves again. There are such 
sweet warm winds, such bright glowing skies — ah ! I was 
happy, I was innocent, I was sinless there! Why are 
those bells ringing? Are they for vespers? No; it is a 
salutation to the Virgin — I forgot. We must take lilies, 
plenty of lilies for the altar; but 1 must not touch them, I 
should soil them, the lilies are so pure, so spotless, and I 
am so sunk, so polluted ; the lilies would wither if my 
hands touched them, and the priests would thrust me from 
the altar, and the Virgin would ask me for my child. I 
used to pray; I cannot now. Hark! those bells are ring- 
ing for the vespers, and I know the words but I cannot say 
them. ‘Pater noster qui es in coelis.’ What are the 
words? I cannot say them. Help me, help me! Why 
will you not say them ? Pray, pray ; do you hear — pray !’^ 

With piteous agony the cry rang out on the still air of 
the breaking day, as the dews gathered gray and thick 
upon her brow and the glazing mist came over her sight, 
and in the darkness of coming death she struggled for 
memory and prayer, as a child gropes in the gloom. 

“ Pray — pray ! What are the words ? Say them — in 
pity, in mercy! He has forgiven! — God will forgive 1 
Pray — pray !” 


346 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


And the voice of the man whom her life had wronged 
fell softly on her ear through the dull, dizzy mists of death, 
as he bent over her and uttered with soothing pity the 
words of her Clmrch, the prayer of her childhood, that 
from his lips to her was the seal of an eternal and compas- 
sionate Pardon : 

“Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum ; 
adveniat regnura tuum; fiat voluntas tua siciit m ccelo et 
in terra; panem nostrum quotidianum, da nobis hodie; et 
dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debi- 
toribus nostris; et ne nos inducas in tentationem sed libera 
nos k malo. Amen I” 

Standing beside his dying wife, Sabretasche spoke the 
prayer to the One Creator — the prayer that should have 
no Creeds; and as the old familiar words winged their way 
to her dying ear, bringing on their echoes soft chimes of 
days long past, and innocence long lost, the wild eyes grew 
tamer, the bent brow relaxed, the hardened lines of age 
and vice grew soft; and before the last Amen had left his 
lips, with one faint, broken, mournful sigh, she died, and 
he, standing beside her, bowing his head in reverence before 
the great mystery of life and death, thanked God that his 
last words to her had been of mercy and of pardon ; that 
his last words had been to her the words of Arthur unto 
Guinevere — 

All is passed; the sin is sinned, and I, 

Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
Forgives; do thou for thine own soul the rest. 


GRANATLLE DE VIGNE. 


341 


II. 


IN THE FOREST OP FONTAINEBLEAU. 

On tlie meeting of those so long held apart by the laws 
of Man, I need not dwell. Nothing now stood between 
them. Words were too cold to paint their present — a 
happiness as full, and even deeper still than that of two 
years before, from the anguish passed, which intensified 
their joy as the golden and rose-hued beauty of the sun- 
set looks even fairer and brighter still when behind it lies 
a dark storm-cloud, passing fast away, but showing what 
the tempest has been. Nothing now stood between them ; 
and within a few days of the night that Sabretasche had 
arrived in Paris, Violet Molyneux became his wife. ^ 

No empty conventionalities kept them apart; they cared 
nothing what the world wondered, nor how it talked; and 
they never thought of the malicious on dits and versions of 
their story, which were the one theme in Parisian salons. 
They went to the south of France for the whole of the 
coming year, to a chateau of the Due de Yieillecour, near 
Pau. Both longed to be away from that gay effervescing 
world of which both were weary, and, under the purple 
skies, in the golden air, and amid the luxurious solitudes 
of the Midi, listening to the hushed and silvery murmur 
of the Garve, that chimed sweet cadence to their own joy 
— there, amid the voluptuous dreamy beauty of one of the 
fairest spots of earth, shut out from that fashionable world 
which had caressed, adored, and slandered him, far away 
from the fret and hum and buzz of outer life, Sabretasche 
surrendered himself to that love which gave him back his 
lost youth in all its glory and its poetry, and as night 


348 


GRANVILLE DE ViaNT5. 


slinks away before the fullness of the dawn, so the shadows 
of his past fell behind him for evermore. 

Sabretasche kept his promise. Alma never knew that 
it was to her own mother she had given the charity she 
begged after midnight mass at the doors of Notre-Dame 
that Christmas-eve. All that had passed in that last in- 
terview with his dead wife, he told to Violet. To find in 
Alma Tressillian, her favorite, her friend — the daughter of 
her own lover — that child whom, without knowing or hear- 
ing of, she had instinctively hated for her mother’s sake — 
hated with the fond, jealous vehemence with which a woman 
who loves hates all or anything that has any tie to, or con- 
nection with, her lover, or shows that another has been as 
near to him as she — that child of whom she could never 
bear to think, and loathed with all the rest of that fatal 
Tuscan brood, who were his curse and his foes, — to find 
Alma, Sabretasche’s daughter, was, at the first flush, in* 
tensely painful to her. 

“ That woman’s child 1” she repeated, turning her bril- 
liant eyes, flashing and earnest, upon him. “I can never 
see her again ! Do not ask me, Vivian. I have been fond 
of her, but now I should never look upon her face without 
recalling her mother — the traitorous wife who could betray 
youP 

That was her first impulse ; but her sense of justice con- 
quered this. If she had never known her before, nothing 
on earth, I am sure, would have induced her to see the 
daughter of her lover and of his dead wife ; and Sabre- 
tasche noticed the involuntary shudder with which she first 
met Alma, after his relation of her connection to himself: 
but Violet was at heart both too generous and too just to 
allow the feeling influence; and in truth, for I do not wish 
to claim for her any virtue she does not possess, she was 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


349 


too full of her own perfect happiness — a joj so sudden, so 
vivid, that she trembled at touching the radiant wings of 
the angel lest it should flee away and leave her desolate 
again — to bear a harsh thought to any soul on earth, or, 
indeed, to think at all of them in that paradise in which 
his love had now lapped her. 

There was more than Alma knew, in the kiss with which 
Violet’s lips lingered on her brow when she bade her fare- 
well on her marriage-day — there was love for him who was 
Alma’s father — there was gratitude for her own joy, too 
deep for hate or anger to mingle with it — and there was, 
for the first time, a relenting pity for the dead woman who 
liad wronged and thrown away that heart on which her 
own now rested so securely. Bound by his promise to his 
wife, Sabretasche had been undecided whether or not to 
tell Alma of the relation there was between them. It was 
almost impossible to tell her without letting her learn, at 
least in some degree, what her mother’s character and life 
had been ; her first questions so naturally would be about 
her mother, her dead mother, of whom she would be so 
anxious to hear all. He had nothing to say but what 
would pain her; nothing but what would compel him to 
break his latest promise to his dead wife. The girl firmly 
believed herself Boughton Tressillian’s grandchild, and she 
reverenced and idolized his memory; it seemed a useless 
cruelty to break the associations and the belief of twenty 
years to substitute in their stead a parentage that must 
give her pain. 

To Jockey Jack, Sabretasche, when he told him of his 
wife’s death, told him also of the tie that existed between 
himself and Alma. He felt no rapture at the discovery, 
nor any sudden and wonderful affection for her sprung up 
in the night like a mushroom, after the custom of men who 
find unknown daughters in romances, and are prepared to 

VOL. II. 80 


iol/ GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

be devoted to them, good or bad, interesting or uninUrcsi* 
ing, for the simple fact of their being their children. On 
the contrary, to know that there was one living who bore 
in her the blood of the wife who had been his curse was 
keenly painful to him ; and though in herself Alma pleased 
him, he shrank from any remembrance or acknowledgment 
of her tie to himself. But, for De Vigne’s sake, he had 
been interested in her before ; and for this, and for ^her 
affection for Yiolet, he strove to conquer the repugnance 
that he felt to her from her mother; and he wished to place 
her above the necessity of relying upon her talents, and to 
give her that position in the world to which her adoption 
by Boughton Tressillian, as well as her relationship to him- 
self, entitled her. To do this was difficult, without telling 
her what he wished to avoid ; but, at Violet’s suggestion, 
he placed in Lord Molyneux’s hands a sum which, relying 
on her ignorance of business and of law, could be given 
her as a remnant of the property of her soi-disant grand- 
father, suddenly repaid by those who had swindled him of 
it. This, Jockey Jack, who would have done far greater 
services for the Colonel, whom he cried up in exact pro- 
portion as his Viscountess cried him down, willingly did. 
Alma, a few days after Violet’s marriage, which took place 
at the British Embassy, heard the Viscount’s relation of her 
sudden inheritance — heard it, unsuspicious that any other 
story was concealed behind it; she was too ignorant of all 
legal matters to detect any flaw there might be in Moly- 
neux’s version of the tale; she knew her grandfather had 
lost an immense fortune in the British Beggars’ Bank, and 
in other speculations; she was not surprised a small por- 
tion should be recovered unexpectedly; and, indeed, beyond 
thanking Lord Molyneux for having so kindly interested 
himself in her concerns, the subject occupied but few of 
her thoughts. As Lord Molyneux had predicted, when 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE* 


351 


the Viscountess heard that Violet's protegee was really of 
good birth, (she of course was left to believe her a verita- 
ble Tressillian,) and entirely independent of her, she began 
to be exceedingly amiable to her, and offered her to stay 
with her if she liked. 

“I shall have no expense for her dress,’’ reasoned my 
lady. “ Men like her almost as much as Violet, even 
though she was only a companion ; if I introduce her as 
my protegee, with a good name and some money, she will 
draw. She is wonderfully fascinating if she likes, for such 
a little thing, and I like plenty of men about my house. 
That detestable St. Jeu d’Esprit hinted the other night 
that I was jealous of Violet — to keep another attractive 
girl with me will silence all that ridiculous scandal. Bt- 
sides an orphan — an artiste with that lovely chevelurc 
doree, and that dead grandfather — one can make quite a 
roman about her. She is very generous, too; she wilt 
pay me well for living where she will have such social ad- 
vantages, and really, with one’s expenses, money grow? 
quite serious. Yes, I will certainly keep her with me, and 
marry her well ; it is so amusing to have something of that 
to do, and, when one can get her to give her opinion about 
dress, her taste is really exquisite, really wonderful, con- 
sidering the seclusion she has lived in, where it must have 
been impossible to study it as it ought to be studied !” 
With which concluding reflection on that grand object of 
her life, and of many other women’s lives too, the Toilette, 
Lady Molyneux rose from the depths of her fauteuil to go 
to confession. She had lately been received, with much 
solemnity in the Catholics, and much bewailing of the 
Protestants, into the bosom of the Roman Church ; but 
whether she would remain there was a query, as twelve 
months before she had been as low as she could possibly 
go, and had gone to Exeter Hall, and, indeed, over the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


i^52 

water to Surrey Chapel, with as much perseverance as she 
now drove to her beloved reverend pere’s very elegant little 
chapel of Ste. Marie Reparatrice, who was certainly a cul- 
tivated and well-bred gentleman — more than can be said 
of all his heretical brethren across the Channel. 

That eloquent and handsome young orator, after the 
fatigues of the winter season, where the odor of his sanc- 
tity and the beauty of his long black eyes had procured 
him more worshipers, penitents, and devotees than he 
knew very well what to do with, especially as they were, 
one and all, fiercely jealous of each other, and quarreled 
for him desperately, (or rather, of course, not for him, but 
for the aid of such a saint toward heaven,) was going to 
stay at Fontainebleau with Madame de Vieillecour. The 
Duchess had taken refuge, too, in religious excitements, 
and chiefly in that particular and most amusing one, 
changing her confessors; Cupid lurks so conveniently be- 
hind the grille of a confessional, where the little mechant 
can be shrived as soon as his mischief is done. He was 
going to stay at Madame de Vieillecour's charming villa, 
and, among many others, the Duchess had invited Lady 
Molyneux thither for a few days before that lady’s de- 
parture for London; and the Viscountess, telling her a 
long and very pretty roman about her protegee — which it 
was quite a pity for Alma’s fame as a heroine of romance 
should not be true — asked permission to bring her also to 
that bijou among villas, poetically named the Diamaa da 
Foret. 

Alma went, leaving word with the porter at the house 
in the Champs Eiysees to tell any gentleman that inquired 
for her that she was gone to stay with Lady Molyneux at 
Madame de Vieillecour’s, at her villa, the Diaman du Foret, 
Fontainebleau. Little as she knew of Sabretasche, the 
moment that she saw him in the salons of the Molyneux’s 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


353 


hotel, and that he had recognized her kindly and cour 
teously, she had asked him, with that fervent warmth 
which blended so strangely in her with her proud and re- 
fined delicacy, for De Yigne — for Sir Fplko. Sabretascho 
saw by the flush upon her cheeks the emotions which flit- 
ted, as all her thoughts and feelings did, across her ex- 
pressive features, that that dangerous friendship had deep- 
ened, as he had predicted, into something far warmer and 
more tender on both sides, and spoke fully and earnestly 
in De Vigne’s praise, and told her of his gallantry, his 
daring, and the safety with which, despite his brilliant and 
reckless courage, he had come through it all ; but he did 
not tell her of De Vigne’s illness, only mentioning that he 
had been detained in Scutari, and would soon come home, 
through Paris. 

“Is the curse of the marriage-tie to fall there, too?” 
thought Sabretasche. “ How will it end for them both ?” 

Alma went to Fontainebleau, and while in the brilliant 
salons of the Diaman du Foret, among some of the greatest 
belles and the most sparkling wits of Paris, La Petite 
Tressillian was admired and sought for that unconscious 
and nameless fascination w'hich her talents and her ways 
gave her over men ; all she thought of was to escape by 
herself amid the beauty of the forest, and under the shadow 
of its stately oaks, its sea-pines, and the beautiful silver 
larches that fill the valleys of the Rocher d’Avon, give 
herself to that deep and rapturous happiness which awoke 
♦or her at the mere thought of De Vigne’s return, as the 
sun bursts out in all its glory after a long and dark tem- 
pestuous night. In proportion to her susceptibility and 
suffering in sorrow, was her sanguine and elastic faith in 
any gleam of happiness. 

It was early morning when De Yigne arrived in Paris. 

Alma’s letter had sent new life and strength into his 
30 * 


354 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


veins; from that hour he recovered, only retarded by that 
impatient and fiery nature which, unaccustomed to oppo- 
sition or delay, chafed at the bodily weakness — that weak- 
ness at any time so great a trial to the strong man — which 
for the first time controlled his will and kept him fettered 
and powerless. But with hope came fresh health and 
fresh vigor; he recovered sufficiently to be moved on 
board the yacht of a man we knew, who, having come 
cruising about the Bosphorus, offered to give us a run to 
Marseilles. The sea air completed the recovery her letter 
had begun ; he lay on the deck smoking, and breathing in 
with the fresh Mediterranean wind his old health and 
strength, and by the time the Sea-foam ran into the Mar- 
seilles harbor he was himself again, and would have been a 
dangerous foe for Yane Castleton to meet. At first he 
had meant to go at once to St. Crucis, for where Alma 
was, or what had become of her, he could not tell, since 
that letter was written on her sick-bed at Montressor’s 
house in Windsor. Then suddenly he remembered that 
the second letter, which he had sent back to her in such 
mad haste on seeing the address, which confirmed Carl- 
ton’s story, had been dated from the Champs Elysees, and 
thither he resolved to go, on the chance of finding her 
there before he went on to England. 

It was early morning when we reached Paris — a bright, 
clear, sweet spring morning in May. After the discomfort, 
the dirt, the myriad disagreeables of Constantinople ; after 
the mud and rain and snow and cheerlessness of the Cri- 
mea, — how gay and pleasant looked those lively, sunny, 
bustling streets of Paris, where everybody seemed de bonne 
humeur, where primroses and violets, cassi and lemonade, 
were being cried ; where Polichinelle was performing, and 
char-Abancs starting with light-hearted students for a day 
in the Bois du Boulogne ; and everywhere around us were 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


:^55 

heard chattering, laughing, voluble and musical, that merry, 
silvery, pleasant language, as familiar to us as our ownl 
What a contrast it was — a contrast very agreeable, let a 
man be ever so voue an tambour, after nearly two years 
such campaigning as we had tasted in the Crimea I 

I drove at once to the English station. De Yigne 
wanted me no more, and they at home at Longholme 
were very impatient for my arrival ; evergreens, triumphal 
arches, October brewed at my birth, county congratula- 
tions, and every possible fatted calf, awaiting me under 
the friendly shadow of my dear old Buckinghamshire 
beech woods. As I shook his hand as we parted, I saw 
he was impatient to be rid of me, and I saw on his face 
that eager, restless, passionate glow which told me he 
would never rest until he had found Alma Tressillian. 
How would it end, I wondered, as I rolled along in the 
chemin de fer to Calais? Did he ask himself so wise a 
question ? I fancy not. Never all his life long had he 
ever asked how any step in his career would end. If he 
had ever done so, that coarse and vulgar beauty, with her 
rouge, and her tinting, and her embonpoint, and her cruel 
glittering eyes, now drinking her coffee with that dash of 
brandy in it she had copied from old Fantyre, reading the 
dirtiest of Le Brun’s stories, in her scarlet peignoir, before 
she attired herself regally, to be driven by little Anatole 
de Beauvoisier to a fete at Fontainebleau, would not have 
been called by Church and Law his Wife. 

“Est ce que Mademoiselle Tressillian demure ici?” he 
asked at the entrance of the hotel which Lady Molyneux 
bad just vacated. 

“Non, monsieur. Elle est partit il y a huit jours, et 
Miladi aussi pour Fontainebleau. Elies sont allees visiter 
chez Madame la Duchesse de Vieillecour, k sa maison do 
plaisance.’’ 


356 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE- 


Quelle Miladi ?” 

“Miladi Molyneux, Madame la Yicomtesse.” 

“Ou est la maison de plaisance ?” 

“A Fontainebleau; le Diaman du Foret, monsieur. Tout 
e monde le sait.” 

With which assurance the porter awaited his departure, 
to return to his plate of onion soup inside his den; and De 
Vigne, signing a fiacre, bade them drive him to the Gare 
for Fontainebleau. 

Minutes seemed to him hours; the train appeared to 
creep along its weary ironway; everything was dark and 
strange to him. How Alma could possibly have become 
acquainted with the Molyneux, still more reside with 
them, and go with the Viscountess to stay with Madame 
de la Vieillecour, appeared inexplicable. The devil of 
doubt again possessed him. The letter that vowed her 
love to him had been written nearly two years before. 
Since then she might have changed ; she might have loved 
some other; she might even have pledged herself to an- 
other man ! He tortured himself with every form of dread 
and doubt, as the train dragged on through the campagne 
printaniere, till it stopped at Fontainebleau, the sun shining 
on the quiet French town, on the stately historic castles, on 
the deep majestic woods that hid in their bosom alike the 
loves of Henri Quatre, the beauty of Gabrielle d’Estrees, the 
death of the grand Conde, and the despair of the man who, 
abandoned alike by his courtiers whom he had ennobled, 
his marshals whom he had created, and his people whom 
he had rescued from the bloody fangs of The Terror, signed 
the act of his abdication in the magnificent halls of his 
favorite palace; where that child was baptized who has 
lived to restore his name and ascend his throne. 

The train stopped at Fontainebleau. De Vigne knew 
it well enough. He had often been there for gay summer 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


35t 


fetes, where the time had passed with sparkling wine and 
evanescent wit and light laughter and ephemeral love, 
before his marriage had darkened his life. The train 
stopped, and he went at once to the -Hotel de la Yille de 
Lyon, where, fifteen or sixteen years before, he remembered 
giving a brilliant dinner to Rose Luillhier, the then pre- 
miere danseuse of the Opera, a gay, flippant little blonde, 
whom he had driven round in a four-in-hand by the Car- 
refous des Boux and Franchard to see the Roche qui 
^^leure, and had drunk champagne and sung Beranger 
songs, and enjoyed his Bacchanalia with all the joyous 
careleSvS revelry of spirits undamped and unwearied. 

Now, Rose Luillhier was a faded, ugly, broken-down 
woman, who, falling through a trap-door and ruining her 
beauty forever, had been glad to keep a mont de piete in a 
small way in a dingy, dark, loathsome hole in the Faubourg 
d’Enfer; and he — he dared not trust his present; he dared 
not look at his future I 

lie went to the Yille de Lyon, and inquired the way to 
Madame de la Yieillecour’s maison de plaisance. It lay 
on the other side of the forest, to the southwest, they told 
him, and they had not a carriage left in the coach-house, 
nor a horse in the stable, there were so many pleasure 
parties to the forest or the palace in this month. He 
went to the Londres, to the Nord, to the Aigle Noir, to 
the Lion d’Or; all their conveyances were hired. It was 
a saint’s day and a holiday in Paris, and numerous parties 
of every grade had come to spend the sweet spring-hours 
in the leafy shades and majestic futaillcs of Fontainebleau. 
He went to Nargein’s and to Bernard’s, in the Rue de 
France ; but he could find no conveyance there. Impa- 
tient of delay, he asked how far it was to walk. 

“ Mais a peu pres sept kilometres, monsieur,” said the 
man of wliom he inquired. “Yoyez done, monsieur! 

3a 



358 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Yous parterez par la Barriere de Paris, vous suiverez le 
cherain de chasse jusqu^ a la Batte des Aires, et alors vous 
prendrez le sentier jusqu’ au foret du Gros Fouteau. Eh 
hien ! apres cela vous prendrez le sentier de I’Araitie et 
dans un quart d^heure vous serez aux Gorges de la Solle 
apres, monsieur ” 

Ye Yigne heard no more of the Frenchman’s voluble 
and bewildering directions; a fierce oath broke from him 
under his breath as three carriages swept past him. In 
the first sat a young Parisian lion, and the woman who 
called herself his wife. From under her parasol of pink 
silk and lace, as she leaned forward, full blowm, high- 
colored, coarse, with a smile on her lips, and that vindictive 
triumph in her cruel eyes which he knew so well, he saw 
her face — that face unseen for eleven long years, since the 
day he had thrown her from him in the church at Yigne. lie 
knew her in an instant, despite every alteration — and they 
were not few that time had made — and faint and sick he 
reeled against the wall of Nargein’s dwelling. 

Thinking of Alma, to see the Trefusis, the woman he so 
unutterably loathed, so fiercely hated ! Was it prophetic 
that that she-devil should forever stand between him and 
the better angel of his life ? She knew him, too, for she 
started visibly ; then she leant forward and bowed to him, 
with a cruel, mocking, fiendish smile. 

“Qui le diable est cet bel homme, Constance?” asked 
Anatole de Beauvoisier. 

“Mon mari,” answered the Trefusis, with her coarse, 
harsh laugh. 

Anatole had a great admiration for this handsome Eng- 
lishwoman, yet he estimated her rightly enough to murmur 
to himself, “Pauvre diable I je le plains I” 

A deadly sickness came over Do Yigne, and a fierce un- 
governable thirst for vengeance on her entered into him. 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


359 


He hated her so unspeakably. Great Heaven ! how could 
it be otherwise? that woman who stood an eternal bar 
between him and love, and peace, and honor ‘ 

He broke from Nargein’s foreman with a hasty douceur 
of a gold five-franc, which took the stead of the thanks he 
could not utter for his bewildering direction, and took the 
route by the Barriere de Paris, trusting to his memory to 
lead him right across the forest, for he had recollected the 
situation of the Diaman du Foret as soon as they had told 
him at the Yille de Lyon that a few years ago it had be- 
longed to the Comte de Torallhier-Moreau, a man whom 
De Yigne had known, and with whom he had had more 
than one night of lansquenet and merry French wit at that 
same Diaman du Foret, then called the Bosquet de Diane. 
He followed the hunting-path that leads to the magnificent 
forest of the Grand Fouteau. It was now after noon, and 
the soft golden sunlight turned to bronze the giant bolls of 
the old oaks and elms, and slept quietly on the soft green 
moss that carpeted the woodland. All around him was 
hushed in the heart of the great royal forest, the waters of 
the lakes were silent, the fountains fell with only a dreamy 
and silvery murmur, the sunshine trembled on the graceful 
silver boughs of the “Dames du Foret,” and the birds were 
singing with soft subdued joy in the dense foliage of those 
shadowy avenues and futailles that had used to echo with 
the bay of hounds, the ring of horses’ hoofs, the mellow 
notes of hunting calls, when through their sunny glades 
the gay courtiers of Fran9ois de Yalois, Henri de Navarre, 
and Louis de Bourbon had ridden for the pleasure of the 
Chasse and the Curee. All was silent around him, save 
for the sweet musical murmur, nameless yet distinguishable, 
as of the coming summer breathing its life and spirit into 
the tender leaves, the waving grasses, and the waters of 
lake and fountain, long chilled and silenced by the iron 


360 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


touch of the past winter. At another time the glory and 
beauty round him— from the giant grandeur of the oaks 
and beeches ‘that had flung their shadows on the brilliant 
beauty of the mother of the Yendome, and the fair sad 
brow of the Mistress of Bourbon and of Bragelonne, to 
the merry hum of the joyous gnats born yesterday to die 
to-morrow, dancing and whirling in the sunshine like the 
gay Human Life that from Philippe le Bel to Louis 
Napoleon have held their rendezvous, their fetes, their love- 
trysts, and their hunting-parties in the royal forest, group 
after group supplanting those that pass away — would have 
awakened and aroused him. But now the very calm and 
loveliness about him irritated and chafed him, for his soul 
was dark with fiery passions ana fierce thoughts, vain re- 
grets and vehement desires, and his love for Alma Tres- 
sillian, his hate for the woman who bore his name and 
who had so foully cheated him, rioted within him like boil- 
ing oil and seething flame mingled together. He strode 
along through the hunting-path, edged on one side with 
brushwood and on the other with great forest trees, only 
thinking sufficiently of the way he went to take the paths 
that bore to the northwest, where he knew, on leaving the 
forest, he should find the maison de plaisance somewhere 
between Fontainebleau and Chailly. He struck into the 
Fulaci du Gros Fouteau, knowing that, by keeping to his 
left, he should come upon the road to Chailly, brushing his 
way through the tangled forest-branches that had stood 
the sunshine and the storm of lengthened centuries. As 
he swung along, his eyes upon the ground, blind to all the 
beauty of the woodlands, he glanced upward to put aside 
the boughs; and — with an inarticulate cry he sprang for 
ward. 

Half sitting, half lying on the fallen trunk of a beech 
that had been struck by lightning a few days before, her 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


361 


liat on the grass beside her, the sunshine falling down 
tlirough the thick branches on to her brilliant golden hair, 
and her delicate, intelligent, expressive features, expressive 
even in complete repose, and while her eyes, fixed on the 
turf at her feet, were veiled beneath her silky curling 
lashes, he saw once more the face that he had last seen 
lifted to his in the summer moonlight at St. Crucis nearly 
two years passed, and gone I 

At the sound of the voice which, in the hum and mur- 
mur of society and the solitude of the long night-watches, 
she had thirsted, yearned, prayed to hear again, Alma 
looked up — in another moment she was in his arms, cling- 
ing to him as if no earthly power should ever part them ; 
weeping passionate tears of joy, then laughing in her 
agony of gladness; her soft warm lips pressed to his, her 
hands clasped round his neck as if she would never let hint 
go from her again, while she had strength, or life, or power 
to keep him ; while dizzy with the delirium of passion and 
of rapture, that surged up in tenfold strength after those 
weary years of absence and of torture, he lifted her from 
the ground and held her in his passionate embrace, crush- 
ing her against his heart, their long and mute caresses 
more eloquent than words. Then Alma raised her face to 
his, flushing with a bright crimson glow, and fading to a 
marble whiteness, her eyes almost black with that eager 
joy which shone in them through their tears, her arms 
clinging closer and closer round him, her voice trembling 
with the love which her vehement Southern nature had 
poured out upon De Yigne. 

“You do not doubt me now? You know how I love 
you — only you ? You will never leave me again ?” 

“Never, my God I — never 1” And as he poured out 
\tpon her in his breathless caresses the passion which words 
VOL. u. 31 


362 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


were too cold and tame to utter, he forgot — for the time, 
utterly, entirely forgot — that cold, cruel, jeering, coarse, 
vindictive face that had passed him but an hour before, 
and — forgot, also, the tie that bound him. 

It was long ere they could summon calmness enough to 
talk of all that both had suffered in those long and weary 
months. Their joy was too deep for any effort at tran- 
quillity ; all she cared for was to look up into his eyes, to 
murmur his name every nowand then as if to assure her of 
his presence, to lavish upon him with tears of joy that ca- 
ressing and vehement fondness natural to her in all the 
abandon and fervor of her Italian blood ; all he cared for 
was to have such love poured out on him ; to drink, after 
lengthened and unbearable drought, of the fresh sweet 
waters of human affection; to lavish on the only thing 
that he loved, and that loved him, all the pent-up well- 
springs of his heart ; to hold her there close — close, so 
that none could come to rob him of her a second time — 
the one lost to him for so long I 

Do you wonder at him ? Go and travel in Sahara, across 
that great, dreary, blinding, shadowless, hopeless plain of 
glaring yellow sand, where you see no living thing save the 
vulture whirling aloft awaiting some dead camel ere it can 
make its loathsome feast; travel with the thirst of the 
desert upon you, your throat parching, your eyes starting, 
your whole frame quivering with longing for the simple 
drop of water which your fellows fling away unvalued. 
When you come to the clear, cool springs flowing with 
musical ripple under the friendly shadows of the banyans 
and the palms, would you have the courage to turn away 
and leave the draught untasted, and go back alone into the 
desert to die ? 

It was long before they could speak of what they had 
both suffered, and when she told him all, more fully than 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE 


863 


Boe could in writing, of Vane Castleton’s treachery and 
brutality, the dark fierce blood surged over his brow, and 
a gloom came upon his face which boded her foe no good. 

“By Heaven ! if a man’s hand can revenge such things, 
he shall pay bitterly for his coward plot,” he muttered to 
himself. 

“ What are you saying ?” asked Alma. 

He kissed the lips which he would not answer : 

“ Do not ask, my darling. To think that dastard villain 
dared to lay his hand upon you wakes a devil in me. My 
God ! to hear of such a brutal plot against what he loves 
best and holds most tenderly, would wake a milder man 
than I to fury. My darling, my precious one I to think 
that brute should have ventured to lure you in his hateful 
toils, should have polluted your ears with his loathsome 
vows, should have dared to touch your little hand with 
his ” 

He stopped ; his fierce anger overmastered him. To 
think Yane Castleton had dared to insult her; to think his 
dastard love, which was poison to any woman, should have 
been breathed on her, on whom he would have had the 
summer wind never play too rudely ; to think that his 
hated kiss should have ventured to touch those soft, warm 
lips, pure as ungathered rose-leaves, that were consecrated 
wholly to himself! De Yigne vowed bitterly to himself to 
revenge it as none of Yane Castletoii’s deeds had been 
revenged before. 

“ Never mind it,” whispered Alma, caressingly. She had 
no fear of De Yigne’s darkest passions — indeed, they en- , 
deared him to her. “Do not think of it. He is a bad 
man ; but, since he could not part us, we may surely for- 
give him, or, at least, forget him ? Now I have you back. 

I could pardon anything. When life is so beautiful and 
God’s mercy so great, one can rarely harbo; hard thoughts 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 




of any one. It is when we suffer that we could re 
venge. ' 

He pressed her closer to his heart: 

“You are better than I, ray little one!’^ 

“No I’^ said Alma, passionately, “ I am better than none ; 
still less am I better than you, noble, generous, knightly as 
you are in thought and in deed, in heart and in soul. I 
loved and reverenced you before more than any woman 
ever did man, but since your courage, your suffering, your 
daring, your heroism, I love you more dearly, I reverence 
you more highly, if indeed it be possible, my love, my lord, 
my husband !” 

As the last word fell on his ear. He Yigne started as at 
a mortal wound from the steel ! That title from her lips 
struck him keenly, bitterly as any sword-thrust ! — to have to 
tell her he had deceived her, to have to give a death-blow 
to that unsuspicious confidence, that deep, true love, that 
radiant, shadowless happiness with which she clung to him, 
as if, now they were together, life had brought her a heaven 
upon earth which no shadow would have power to cloud ; 
to have to quench the light in her sunny eyes, and tell her 
that another called him by that name I 

The hand that held both hers trembled ; the warm, pas- 
sionate glow faded off his face; his heart turned sick: how 
could he tell her that for three long years the secret of his 
life had been withheld from her — that, married, he had gone 
to her as a free man — that, bound himself, he had won her 
love in all its depth and fervency — that, trusted implicitly, 
worshiped entirely, he had gone on from day to day, from 
week to week, with that fatal tie unacknowledged, that 
dark and cruel secret unconfessed? And she looked up 
in his face, too, as she clung to him, with such a world of 
love and worship, such a glory of passionate and eager 
joy in her brilliant, loving eyes, that seemed never to weary 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE 


3(55 


of gazing into his I And he had to say to her: “Your 
trust is unmerited. I have deceived you 

Never until that hour had De Yigne realized the whole 
horror, weight, and burden of the fetters the Church had 
lent its hand to forge eleven long years before. Uncon- 
sciously and innocently the woman, who would have 
periled her life to save him a single pang, struck a yet 
sharper blow to the just-opened wound I Noticing the 
gloom that gathered in his eyes, Alma, to dispel, laughed, 
with her old gay and childlike insouciance, which she had 
never felt before since the evening they had parted in the 
little studio at St. Crucis. 

“Yes, Sir Folko, in one thing I am better than you. I 
have more faith I You could doubt and disbelieve your 
own Alma; you could think that, after loving you, she 
could desert, and forget, and betray you ; you could credit 
cruel reports that made her the most false, contemptible, 
loathsome of her sex — but 1 never dreamt of doubting 
you, though I might have done so. Sir Folko, I had 
stronger evidence still ! But I trusted you, my lord, my 
love I I would have disbelieved angels had they come to 
witness against you ; in your absence none should dare to 
slander you to me ; and if they had brought proofs of 
every force under the sun, I would have thrown them in 
their teeth as falsehoods and forgeries, if they had stained 
your honor !” 

She spoke now with that vehement eloquence which 
always came to her when roused to any deep emotion or 
warm excitement; her eyes flashed, and her face glowed 
with love, and pride, and faith. Yet — every one of those 
noble and tender words quivered like a knife in his heart! 
He bent his head till his brow rested on her hair; and the 
man, whose iron nerves had not quailed, nor pulse beat 
one shade quicker, before the deadly flame blazing from 

31 * 


3t6 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the thirty guns at Balaklava, shuddered as he thought, 
^‘How can I tell her I have deceived her!” Unconscious 
of the effect her words had on him, or the sting which lay 
for him in her noble and innocent trust, Alma went on — a 
glow of scorn, contempt, and haughty impatience at the 
memory passing over her face, with one of those rapid 
mutations of expression which gave her face one of its 
greatest charms : 

“Oh, Granville, how I hated that woman that TiOrd 
Vane sent to pretend to be your wife! He was very un- 
wise not to choose some one a little more refined, and like 
what your wife might have been ! She was such a bold, 
coarse, cruel-eyed woman, with not the trace of a lady in 
her, for all her showy, gorgeous dress. Who do you think 
she could have been ? Some actress, I should fancy — 
should not you ? — whom he paid to take the role, but she 
did it very badly.” And Alma laughed — a low, glad, sil- 
very laugh — at the recollection. “ She was not much like 
a woman who had loved and lost you; there was not a 
shadow of regret, or tenderness, or softness in her when 
she spoke of you, and to think she should dare to take your 
name — should dare to presume to claim you! And she 
actually had the audacity to show me your name on that 
piece of paper that she called a marriage-certificate. 1 
don’t know whether it was like one, for I never saw one ; 
l)ut they had written your name. Oh ! Granville, how I 
hated her — the coarse, audacious, insulting woman, who 
dared to assume your name ! I could have struck her — I 
could have done anything to her. She roused ray ‘devil,’ 
as you call it. If she had stayed another moment I should 
have rung for nurse to turn her out of the room. It sounds 
absurd to say so, for she was such a tall, dashing, would-be 

grandiose woman ; but I do think she was afraid of me 

she did not like me to look straight at her and detect he.r 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


8G7 


falsehoods But 1 never believed her, my own dearest — 
never for a moment. Thank God, my trust in you never 
wavered for an instant, and she never tempted me even in 
one passing thought to disgrace you with the doubt that 
that coarse, bad woman had ever been your wife. Thank 
God, I was too worthy of your love to insult you, even 
with a thought of credence in her ill-laid plot !” 

“Stop, stop — for the love of Heaven — or you will kill 
me 1” burst involuntarily from He Yigiie. He felt as if his 
heart would break, his brain give way, if she said another 
word to add to the coals of fire she was heaping so inno- 
cently upon his head I Every word she uttered in her 
unconscious gladness, in her noble faith, seemed to brand 
his soul with shame and suffering, which years would never 
have^power to efface; — to have to tell her her trust had 
oeen misplaced — to have to confess to her that the woman 
whom she truly thought would disgrace him was his wife — 
to have to listen to those fond, proud, trusting words, and 
answer them with what would quench and darken all her 
glad and generous faith, and, for aught he knew, turn from 
him forever that love to which he clung with all the 
strength and passion of his nature ! Proud, candid, w^or- 
shiping truth as she did, would she love him still when she 
knew that for three long years that dark secret had been 
kept unspoken and uncoiifessed between them? Idolizing 
and reverencing him as she did, thinking him matchless 
for honor, nobility, and stainless aristocracy of blood, and 
name, and character, could he hope to keep that idolatry, 
which was so dear to him, when she heard that he had 
allied himself to one whom even her slight knowledge of 
her had seen to be utterly unworthy and beneath him — 
when she heard that he, whose idol, like her own, had been 
honor, had kept hidden and shrouded from her the dark, 
inexorable bonds with which the marriage-tie had chained 
awd weighed him down ? 


368 


GRANVILLE DE V'IGNE. 


Startled and terrified, she tried to look into his face ; but 
his head was bent, so that she could see nothing save the 
blue veins swelling on his forehead. 

“Granville, dearest, what have I said — what have I 
done? Speak to me, answer me, for Heaven’s sake !” 

He did not answer her. What could he say? The 
veins on his temples grew like cords, and all the glow of 
eagerness and passion, so bright on his face a few moments 
ago, faded away into that dead, gray pallor which had 
overspread his face upon his marriage-day. A vague and 
horrible terror came over the woman who loved him. She 
threw her arms round his neck ; she pressed her warm lips 
to his forehead, pale and lined with the bitter thoughts in 
his brain ; she only thought of him then, never of herself. 

“Granville, tell me, what have I said — I, who would 
give my life to spare you the slightest pain ?” 

He seized her in his arms; he pressed her against his 
heart, throbbing to suffocation: 

“My worshiped darling I do not speak gently to mel 
That woman is my wife !” 

It was told at last — the stain on his name, the curse on 
his life, the secret kept so long ! Her face was raised to 
his; its fair, girlish bloom changed to his own bloodless 
and lifeless pallor, her eyes wide open, with a vague, 
amazed horror in them. She scarcely understood what he 
had said; she could not realize it in the least degree. 

“Your wife I” she repeated, mechanically, after him 
“Yowr wife! Granville, darling, you are jesting, you are 
trying me; it is not true !” 

He held her closer to him, and rested his lips on her 
golden hair; he could not bear to see those fond, frank 
eyes gaze into his with that pitiful terror, that haunting, 
pleading earnestness which would not believe even his own 
words against him ! 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


369 


“God forgive me, it is truel’’ 

With a cry that rang through the old beech woods and 
oak coppices of the forest, Alma bowed down before the 
blow dealt to her by the hand that loved her best. She 
did not weep, like most women, but her heart paused 
almost long enough for life to cease. She gasped for 
breath ; the blood rushed to her brain, crimsoning all 
her face, then left it white and colorless as death. She 
pressed her hand upon her heart, struggling for breath, 
looking up in his face all the while, as a spaniel that its 
master had slain would look up in his, the love outliving 
and pardoning the death-blow. 

For the moment he thought he had killed her. Like a 
madman, he called upon her name ; he covered her blanched 
lips with caresses passionate enough to call back all their 
life and warmth; he vowed to Heaven that he loved her 
dearer than any husband ever loved his wife ; that he hated 
the woman who bore his name — wretch, fiend, she-devil that 
she was ! He called her his own, his love, his darling; he 
swore never to leave her while his life lasted; he, besought 
her, if ever she had cared for him, to look at him and tell 
him she forgave him I 

She did not shrink from him a moment, but clung the 
closer to him, breathless, trembling, quivering with pain, 
like a delicate animal after a cruel blow, her heart throb- 
bing wildly against his. She looked up in his face with 
that passionate love which would never change to him nor 
desert him: 

■ “ Forgive you ! Yes, what would I not forgive you I 
But ” 

Her voice broke down in convulsive sobs, and she lay 
in his arms weeping unrestrainedly, with all the force and 
vehemence of her nature; while he bowed his head over 
her and his own bitter, scorching tears fell on her bright 


370 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


goldeij hair. He let her weep on and on, her strongest 
and deepest feelings pouring themselves out in that re- 
sistless tide of emotion which with her never relieved, 
but rather increased, her suffering. He could not speak 
to her; he could only clasp her tighter and tighter to 
him, murmuring broken, earnest words of his agonized 
remorse. 

Once she looked up at him with those radiant eyes, from 
which he had quenched the light and glory : 

“You do not love her, Granville? You cannot I” 

There was her old passionate vehemence in the question 
. — as passionately he answered her : 

“Love herl Great Heaven! no word could tell you 
how I hate her; how I have hated her ever since thai 
cursed day when she first took my name, to stain it and 
dishonor it. My precious one ! my hate for her is as great 
as iny love for you ; greater it cannot be 1” 

“And yet — she is your wife! Oh God have pity on 
us !” 

Her lips turned white, as if in bodily pain, her eyes 
closed, and she shivered as with great cold. 

He pressed her against his heart; great drops of suffer- 
ing stood upon his brow. It was an agony greater than 
death to him to see the misery on her young, radiant face, 
and to know that he had brought it there — he who would 
have sheltered her from every chill breath, guarded her 
from every touch of the sorrow common to all human 
kind. 

“Would to Heaven I had died before my selfish pas- 
sions brought the shadow of my curse on your young 
head !” he muttered, as he bent over her. “Alma, you 
forgive me — but you cannot love me after I have deceived 
you. You cannot love me, false as I have been to my o\\n 
dol of truth and honor. God knows 1 meant no deliber- 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


371 


me wrong. 1 went on and on from day to day, till what 
had been at first merely distasteful to tell, became ai last 
impossible! Answer me; can your affection survive the 
bitter wrong I have done it ? Can you love me though I 
fall from your ideal, though I have sunk so low 

Breathless he w’aited for her answer — breathless and 
trembling, his face white as hers, his firm and haughty 
lips quivering with suspense, his head bent and humbled, 
as he made one of the hardest, yet one of the noblest con- 
fessions a proud man can ever make — “7 was wrong 
She lifted her face to bis, so true to the generous and 
faithful and unswerving love that, two years before, she 
had promised him, that even in the first bitterness of her 
grief her thought was of him and not of herself. 

“Love you? 1 must love you while my life lasts. 
Nothing could change me to you ; if you were to err, to 
alter, to fall as low ins man can fall, you would but be the 
dearer to me; and if all the woild stoned and hooted you, 
1 would cling the closer to you, and we would defy it, or 
endure it — together P^ 

She spoke again, with her old vehemence, her arms 
twining close about bis neck, her lips soft and warm 
against his cheek, her eyes gazing up into his, dark and 
brilliant with the impassioned love that was the life of 
her life; then — the passion faded from her eyes, the glow 
from her face; with a convulsive sob her head drooped 
upon her breast, and she fell forward on bis arm, weep- 
ing hopelessly, wearily, agonizedly, as I saw a woman in 
the Crimea weep over her husband’s grave. 

“ God help me ! 1 do not know what I say. If I am 
wrong tell me; if I sin, slay me — but cease to love you I 
cannot P^ 


372 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


PART THE TWENTY-SIXTH. 


I. 


THE TEMPTATION OF A LIFE. 

In a few broken, earnest words, De Yigne told her of 
that fatal marriage-bond which had cost him his mother’s 
life, stained his own name, banished him from his ancestral 
home, cursed his life with a bitter and futile regret, and 
now brought misery on a life dearer than his own ; and it 
touched him deeply to see, as she listened to his story, how 
utterly her own sorrow was merged into her grief for him ; 
her misery at all he had suffered in his cruel bondage; 
her loathing, at the thought of all ha had borne for those 
eleven long years, in even nominal connection with such, 
as her quick perception had told her the Trefusis must be. 
It touched him deeply to see how her own wrongs, and 
his want of candor and of truth toward her, faded away 
unremembered in her grief and sympathy for him, and she 
was more dear, more dangerous to him in that hour of 
suffering, than in her most brilliant, her most tender, her 
gayest, sweetest, or most bewitching moments. 

Wrapt in that silent communion, absorbed in the bit- 
terness in which the first moments of their reunion were 
steeped, neither heard a footfall on the forest turf, nor saw 
the presence of one, who, drawing near them, looked on 
the completion of that vengeance which had struck its first 
blow so many years before, and now came to deal its last. 
They neither saw nor heard her, till her chill, coarse, harsh 
tones stirred the sweet, soft air. 

“Miss Tressillian, two years ago you chose to disbelieve; 


GRANVILLE DE YIGNE. 


373 


or feign to disbelieve, my claims upon your lover. Ask 
Major De Yigne now, in my presence, if he can dare to 
deny that I am his lawful wedded wife 

With an involuntary cry of horror, Alma looked up, in- 
stinctively clinging closer to De Yigne in the presence of 
this woman, so loathsome and so hateful to them both. 
With a fierce oath he sprang to his feet, standing once 
more face to face, as he had stood at the marriage-altar 
of Yigne, with the woman whom the Church had made his 
wife. There they met at last in the solemn, silent aisles 
of the great royal forest, heaven above head, nature around 
so calm, so fair, so peaceful ; there they met at last, those 
two fierce foes whom the marriage-laws assumed to hold 
as “two whom God had joined together!” she looking at 
him with her cruel laugh, a leering triumph in her cold 
glittering eyes, a devilish sneer upon her lip, hating him 
with the chill, ceaseless hate which evil natures feel for 
those whom they have wronged; he gazing down on her, 
his brow crimson with the conflicting passions warring in 
him, his eyes flashing fire on her, his face dark with the 
anger, the loathing, and the scorn the very sight of her at 
such a moment roused in him. Between him, clinging to • 
his arm in vague terror for him, as if to shield him from 
the cruel hatred of his wife and deadliest foe — clinging to 
him as if she defied all power to part them, yet feared 
some hand stronger than her own which would wrench 
them asunder — was the woman he loved. On the one 
hand, the she-devil that had cursed his life ; on the other, 
tlie better angel, which had nestled in his heart to touch 
all its deeper chords and waken all its purer aspirations. 

The Trefusis looked at him, and smiled a smile that 
chilled his blood as the cold gleam of the dagger in the 
moonlight chills the blood of a man waking from sweet 
VOL. II. 32 3i 


374 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


dreams to find himself fettered and bound in the clutches 
of his most cruel foe. 

“Ask him, Miss Tressillian !” she said again. “You 
disbelieved me. See if Granville De Vigne, who in by- 
gone days used to boast very grandly of his truth and 
honor, dare tell you a lie before my face, and say that I 
am not his lawful wife.” 

Cold and haughty rushed the words to Alma’s lips, her 
dark-blue eyes flashing with the scorn and the fire latent 
in her semi- Southern nature, and impetuous passion blaz- 
ing into flame : 

“Major De Yigne would not lower himself so far to 
your level as to tell a falsehood, though he well might be 
tempted to renounce the stain upon his name of connection 
with such as yourself. But he has nothing to confess. I 
know all ; and if the sorrow be his, the shame of his mar- 
riage rests solely upon you.” 

. The Trefusis laughed scornfully to cover her mortifica- 
tion. She had never counted on De Vigne having himself 
confessed his marriage, and she was cheated of her wished- 
for triumph in tearing from him his last love, in seeing his 
haughty head bowed before her, and in driving from his 
side the woman whom she hated, for that one cutting 
speech at St. Crucis, almost as bitterly as she hated him. 

She laughed that coarse, harsh laugh which, with many 
other of the traces of her origin and her innate vulgarity, 
had crept out since, her aim now attained, she had flung 
off that ever-uncongenial gloss and varnish of refinement 
which she had assumed to lure De Vigne. 

“ Y"ou take the high hand, young lady ! Well, you are 
very wise to make the most of a bad bargain ; and since 
you cannot be his wife, to pretend it is the more honorable 
post to be his mistress I I wish you joy ; his love has eveJ 
been so very famous for its constancy 1” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


375 


“Woman I silence!” broke in De Yigne, so fiercely, 
that even the Trefusis paused for the moment, and shrank 
from the lurid fire flashing from his eyes, and the dark 
wrath gathered in his face, “If you dare to breathe 
another of your brutal insults in her ear, I vow by Heaven 
that your sex shall not shield you from my vengeance. 
You have wronged me enough. You shall not venture 
to try your coarse insolence and ribald jests on one as 
high above you in her purity and nobility and truth as yon 
heavens are above the earth I My love, my darling!” he 
whispered passionately, bowing his head over Alma, who 
still clung to his arm, her color changing from a crimson 
flush to an ashy whiteness, her face full of horror, terror, 
loathing, scorn at the first coarse words that had ever 
been spoken to her — that had ever breathed to her of 
shame ! “do not heed her; do not listen to her. She is a 
bold, bad woman, who cares not what she says, so that it 
may sting or injure me. Oh, God, forgive me ! that I 
should have brought you into this !” 

“Purity! nobility!” re-echoed the Trefusis, with her 
cold, loud laugh. “ Since when have those new idols had 
any attraction for you, cher Granville ? In by-gone days 
all you used to care for were, if I recollect rightly, a car- 
nation bloom and a fine figure ; and if the external pleased 
your senses, I never knew you care particularly for the 
over-cleanliness of mind and character. How long have 
you begun to learn platonics? The role will hardly suit 
you long, I fancy. Why, we shall have you ‘moral’ next, 
and preaching ‘pure’ religion. A leopard cannot change 
his spots, we have holy authority for believing; nor can 
you change your nature, and keep faithful six months to- 
gether If Miss Tressillian likes to be added to the string 
of your cast-off loves, it is no concern of mine, though you 
are my husband.” 


376 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


His face grew white as death ; he to stand by and hear 
Aima insulted thus ? With a fierce gesture he lifted hia 
arm ; forgetful of her sex, he would have struck her in his 
wrath, his grief, his insulted pride, his maddened passions j 
but Alma caught his arm : 
my sake ” 

The low, trembling words, the touch of her little soft 
hand, the sight of her pale, upraised face^ with its dark 
fond eyes, stood between him and his passion as no other 
thing on earth would have done. For “her sake” his arm 
dropped, and he stopped in that mad anger in which, if he 
had given reins to it, he could have murdered the woman 
who, not content with vengeance upon him, must come to 
wreak it on another dearer than himself. The dark blood 
surged again over his brow; he put his hand upon his 
breast, as he had done at the marriage-altar, to keep down 
the storm of passions raging in his heart. 

“Out of my sight, out of my sight,” he muttered, “or 
by Heaven I shall say or do that you will wish to your 
dying day unsaid and undone I” 

Something in the grand wrath of his tempestuous and 
fiery nature awed and stilled even the Trefusis ; a dogged 
sullenness overspread her face ; she was foiled and mas- 
tered, and for the first time her revenge was wrested from 
her grasp. Whether she w.ould have left him subdued by 
a nature even stronger than her own, or whether she would 
have stood her ground and expended the vulgar anger of 
her character in coarse jests and ribald sneers, I cannot 
tell; for at that minute light laughter and lighter foot- 
steps, and low merry voices, broke on their ear, and 
through the beech-boughs of the Gros Fouteau came 
Madame de la Yieillecour and her party, who, having a 
sort of fete champetre in the forest, had come to look foi 
La Petite Tressillian, whom they had 'eft alone, at her 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


377 


own request, to sketch the sunlight glancing off and on 
among the massive branches and budding leaves of Riche- 
lieu’s Oak. 

Madame de la Yieillecour recognized De Yigne with 
surprise ; she saw, moreover, that she and her party were 
come at an untimely season on a painful scene ; but, like a 
well-bred woman of the world, showed neither astonish- 
ment nor consciousness, but coming forward with her 
delicate gloved hands outstretched, welcomed him home 
witli pleasant fluent French words of congratulation and 
pleasure. 

It was well for him that he had learnt, long years before, 
the first lesson society gives its pupils: to smile when their 
hearts are breaking; to seem calm and courteous when 
fiercest thoughts are rioting within ; to wear a pleasant, 
tranquil, unmoved air while the vultures gnaw at their 
life-strings, as the Indian at his funeral pyre smiles on those 
who would fain see him quiver and hear him groan. It 
was well for him that he had learnt “good breeding” in 
its most essential point; knew how to suffer and give no 
sign — a lesson they learn to the highest perfection who 
suffer most — or he could hardly have answered Madame 
de Yieillecour as he did, calmly, courteously listening to 
her fluent congratulations, while the stormy passions, just 
aroused in all their fullest strength, raged and warred in 
his heart; while on the one side stood the woman he so 
passionately loved, on the other the wife he as passionately 
loathed. 

“Come back to dinner with us,” continued Madame de 
Yieillecour; “the carriages are waiting near. Alma, ma 
belle, you look ill ; you are tired, and the sun has been too 
hot.’' 

She turned away with her gay party, talking to De 
'^igne, who instinctively followed and answered the Duch- 
82 « 


o78 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


ess, who kept up the flow of conversation for him ; he cfarefl 
not look into that fair, fond face beside him, nor she into 
his. Suddenly the clear, cold, hard tones of the Trefusis, 
at whom, since his last words, he had not glanced, and 
whom Madame de la Yieillecour had not observed in the 
demi-lumiere of the forest, which was growing dark, now 
that the sun had set, hissed through the air, arresting all : 

“Granville, may I trouble you for a few words before you 
leave ? I thought it was not corame il faut for a husband 
to accept an invitation before his wife’s face in which she 
was not included I” 

Madame de la Vieillecour turned suddenly; the harsh 
and rapid English was lost on the rest of her party, but 
she, despite all her tact and high breeding, stared first at 
the speaker, then at De Yigne. 

“ Mais ! — quelle est done cette femme !” 

He did not hear her; he had swung round, his face, 
even to his lips, white and livid with passion — passion too 
deep and concentered to find for the moment vent in words. 
Careless of all observers, Alma clasped both hands upon 
his arm : 

“Do not go,” she whispered. “Come with me. Do 
not stay with her, if you love me I” 

For once he was deaf to. her prayer; his lips quivered, 
his eyes filled with lurid fire ; it was unutterable torture to 
have that woman — bold, bad, hateful, all that he knew her 
to be — stand there and claim him as her husband, with 
that fiendish laugh and coarse exultation, before the one so 
unspeakably dear and precious to him — torture that goaded 
him till he felt rather devil than man. “A few words with 
me ! Yes I we will have a few more words. By Heaven, 
they shall be such as you will remember to your grave.” 

Alma clung to his arm, breathless, trembling, white with 
fear, as he muttered the words fiercely under his breath 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNR 


379 


“ Granville, Granville, if you love me, do not sta^ with 
her I She will madden you, she will kill you, she will make 
you do something you will repent. For my sake, come , 
leave her to do and say her worst. She is beneath your 
vengeance !” 

For the first time he was deaf to her entreaties — for the 
first time he would not listen to her voice. He put her 
hands off his arm, and answered her in the same low 
whisper : 

“Go, my darling; I will rejoin you. Fear nothing 
from me ; she has already done her worst, and in all I do 
or say while my life lasts, I shall remember you. Go !” 

He spoke gently, but too firmly for her to resist him. 
He turned to Madame de la Yieillecour : 

“Allow me, Madame, to speak a few words with this 
person. I will rejoin you as soon as possible. You do 
not dine till nine 

“Not till nine! I will leave a horse for you at the 
entrance of the Gros Fouteau — au revoir !” 

Certain indistinct memories arose in the Duchess’s mind 
of a story her brother, poor little Curly I had told her, 
long ago, of some unhappy and ill-assorted marriage his 
idol and his chief, Granville De Yigne, had made. With 
ready tact she hastened to cover whatever was disagree- 
able to him, and with a quick guess at the truth, she glanced 
at Alma’s face, and tapped her on the shoulder with her 
parasol : 

“ Ya t’en petite; il commence a faire froid et ces beaux 
yeux bleux sont trop chers a trop du monde, pour que je 
le permette de t’enrhumer.” 

They went; a turn in the road soon hid them from sight, 
and De Yigne and the woman who called herself his wife 
were left in the twilight, deepening around them. They 
stood alone the clear soft skies above, the great shadows 


380 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


of tho mighty forest deepening slowly toward them over 
the velvet turf. For a moment neither spoke. Perhaps 
the memory was too strong in both of eleven years before, 
when they had stood thus face to face before the marriage- 
altar, to take those vows — on one side a lie and a fraud, on 
the other a curse life-long and inexorable. 

Alma knew him aright — this woman did madden him. 
She had set light to all the hottest passions in him, and 
they now flared and raged far beyond any power of his to 
still them. Fiery as his nature was, the hate and anguish 
to which the past hour had roused him, his loathing for 
this woman, who only bore his name to dishonor it and 
only used the tie of wife to torture and insult him, over- 
mastered reason and self-control, and unloosed the bonds 
of all that was darker and fiercer in his character, which 
lay unstirred in him as in a lesser or. a greater measure in 
the hearts of all men. 

She spoke first, with that coarse sneer upon her face 
which roused him and stung him more bitterly than any- 
thing — the sneer that had been on her lips when she signed 
her name in the register at Yigne: 

“Granville De Yigne, we have met at last ! It is twenty 
years since we parted at Frestonhills. You have found ray 
promised revenge no child’s play, no absurd bombast as 
you fancied it, eh ? I befooled you, I intoxicated you. I 
led you on, against counsel, reason, prudence. I made 
you offer me your name, your grand old name which you 
prized so high ! I won you as my husband, my husband 
‘until death us shall part.’ Do you remember the sweet 
words of the marriage service that bound us together for 
life, mon cher ? I won you as my husband — I, the beggar’s 
daughter 1 I have driven you from your home; I have 
made tho memory of your mother a weight of remorse to 
you forever; I have cheapened your name, and made it 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


381 


hateful to you ; I have exiled you often from your country ; 
I stand a bar, as long as you and I shall live, to your peace 
and happiness. You laughed once when I vowed to be 
revenged on you ; you can hardly laugh at it now 

“Oh! devil incarnate!” burst from De Yigne, all the 
mad agony in him breaking bounds. “Oh! wretch, di- 
vorced in truth from the day we stood together at the 
altar, evil enough I have done, but not enough to be 
cursed with you I Have I been so far worse than my 
fellow-men that I must needs be punished with such 
cruel chastisement? You were revenged; your lust for 
position and money made you plan out schemes which — 
I being drunk with madness — succeeded and triumphed. 
But hardened as you are, you may tremble at the fiend 
you raise in me. I tell you in your wildest dreams you 
never pictured, in his fiercest wrath no mortal ever felt, 
the hate — the fearful hate — that I now feel for you !” 

She laughed again — that coarse, cold, brutal laugh, which 
thrilled through every inmost fiber of his nature. 

“No doubt you do, for the bonds by which I hold you 
are those that neither church nor law, wealth nor desire, 
once forged, can break. You want your freedom, Gran- 
ville De Yigne; but while I live you know well enough 
that do what you may you will never have it. You want 
to wash off the stain from your name. You want to go 
back to your lordly home without my memory poisoning 
the air. You want your liberty, if only on the old plea 
for which you used to want all things that were not easy to 
get, because it is unattainable. Of course you hate me I 
Perhaps that golden- haired child whom I found you weep- 
ing over so pathetically, finding mere love an unprofitable 
connection, wanted to work on you to put your freedom in 
her hands, and you would fain be quit of rve to pay down 
the price again for a new passion ” 


382 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


With a fierce spring like a panther, De Yigne seized her 
by the arm, while even she recoiled from the dark passion 
lowering on his brow and flaming in his eyes. 

“Dare to breathe one word of her again, and I shall 
forget your sex ! Her name shall never be polluted by 
passing your lips, nor her purity sullied by even a hint 
from your coarse mind. Let her alone, I tell you, or by 
Heaven it may be worse for you than you ever dream !” 

She quailed before the passion in his voice, the strength 
of the iron grip in which he held her; but her fiendish 
delight in goading him to fury outweighed her fear. She 
laughed again. 

“Sullied! polluted! I fancy your protection will do 
that more completely than my pity. Remember, your 
love damns a woman almost as utterly as the Roman 
Emperor’s approach I Remember, the world will hardly 
believe in the purity and nobility on which it now pleases 
you to sentimentalize so prettily ; it will hardly believe in 
them from a lion like Granville De Yigne, especially when 
he selects for his inamorata one of Yane Castleton’s for- 
saken loves !” 

An oath, so fierce, that it startled even her, stopped her 
in her jeering, coarse, and hardened slander. The boiling 
oil was flung upon the seething flames, lashing them into 
fury. He was stung past all endurance, and the insult to 
his strongest and most precious love, the slander of the 
woman whom he knew as noble and as stainless as any 
child of man can ever be, goaded him on to madness. 
Anger, fury, hatred, entered into him in their fullest 
force; he neither knew nor cared in that moment what 
he did; the blood surged over his brain, and flamed in 
his veins like molten fire; he seized her in his grasp as a 
tiger on his prey. 

“Woman, devil, silence I Oh that you were of ray 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


38:5 

sex, that I could wreak such vengeance on you for your 
slanderous lies as you should carry with you to the 
grave I” 

Her fierce and cruel eyes looked into his in the dull gray 
twilight, with that leer and triumph iu them with which she 
gloated over the misery she caused. 

“You would kill me if I were a man? I dare say, 
though I am a woman, you would scarcely scruple to do 
so if you were not afraid of the law, which is inexorable 
on murder as on marriage I You would not be the first 
husband who killed his wife when he fell in love with an- 
other woman, though whether it would honor your boasted 
escutcheon much ” 

She stopped, stricken with sudden awe and fear at the 
passion she had stung and tortured into being. As his 
eyes looked down into hers with the fury she had roused, 
and the iron grip of his hands clinched harder and harder 
upon her, for the first time it flashed upon her that she was 
in his power — the power of the man she had so bitterly 
wronged, and whom she had now goaded on to reckless 
fury and maddened despair. She knew his fiery passions 
. — she knew his lion-like strength — she knew his cruel and 
unavenged wrongs, and she trembled, and shivered, and 
turned pale in his relentless grasp, for she was in his 
hands, and had aroused a tempest she knew not how to 
lay. 

“Wretch I fiend I if you tempt me to wash out my 
wrongs, and slay you where you stand, your blood will be 
on your own head I” 

His voice, as it hissed in the horrible whisper, sounded 
strange even to his own ear, every nerve in his brain thrilled 
and throbbed, flashes of fire danced before his eyes, through 
which be saw cold, cruel, hateful, the face of his temptress 
and his foe. . The cool pale heavens whirled around him, 


384 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


the giant forms of the forest trees seemed dark and ghastly 
shapes laughing at his wrongs and goading him to crime. 
His grasp tightened and tightened on her; she had nc 
strength against him; her life was in his power — that life 
which only existed to do him such hideous wrong; that 
life which stood an eternal bar between him and love, and 
peace, and honor; that one human life which stood barring 
him out from heaven, and which in one flash of time he 
could snap, and still, and destroy forever from his path, 
which its presence so long had cursed. 

They were alone, shrouded and sheltered in the dim soli- 
tude of the coming night; there were no witnesses in that 
dense forest, no eyes to see, no ears to listen, no voices to 
whisper whatever might be done under the cover of those 
silent beechwood shades. 

That horrible hour of temptation! — coming on him 
when, with every passion stung to madness, his blood 
glowed ready to receive the poison ! The night was still 
around them, there was not a sound, save the sigh of the 
forest leaves; not a thing to look upon them, save the 
little crescent moon and the evening star, rising from the 
dying sun-rays. Night and Solitude — twin tempters — 
gathered round him; his heart stood still, his brain was 
on fire, his eyes blind and dizzy ; alone, out of the gray 
and whirling haze around him he saw that cold, cruel face, 
with its mocking, fiendish gaze, and clear and horrible the 
voice of a fell Temptation whispered in his ear, “Her life 
is in your hands, revenge yourself. Wash out the stain 
upon your name, win back the liberty you crave, efface the 
loathsome insults on the woman you love. You hate her, 
and she stands between you and the heaven you crave — 
take the life that destroys your own. For your love, she 
gave you fraud ; for your trust, betrayal ; for your name, 
disgrace. Avenge it ! It is just 1 One blow, never heard, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


385 


and never known by any mortal thing, and you have free- 
dom back, and love !” 

His brain reeled under the horrible temptation ; uncon- 
sciously his grasp tightened and tightened upon her, too 
strong for her to have power or movement left. The night 
whirled around him, tlie pale-blue skies grew crimson as 
with blood, the great gnarled trunks of the trees seemed to 
mock and grin like horrid spirits, goading him to evil, his 
passions surged in madness through his veins ; and clear 
and horrible he seemed to hear a tempter’s voice : “Avenge 
your wrongs and you are free !” With a cry, a throe of 
agony, he flung the fell allurement from him, and threw 
her from his grasp. “Devil, temptress! thank Heaven, 
not me, I have not murdered you to-night I” She lay 
where he had thrown her in his unconscious violence, 
stunned, less by the fall than by the terror of the moment 
past — that moment of temptation that had seemed eternity 
to both. She lay on the fresh forest turf, dank with the 
glittering evening dews, and he fled from her — fled as men 
flee from death or capture — fled from that crime which had 
lured him so nearly to its deadly brink — which so nearly 
had cursed and haunted his life with the relentless terror, 
the hideous weight of a human life silenced and shattered 
by his hand, lain by his deed in its grave, sent by his will 
from its rightful place and presence in the living, laughing 
earth, into the dark and deadly mysteries of the tomb. 

He fled from the hideous temptation which had assailed 
him in that hour of madness — he fled from the devil of 
Opportunity to which so many sins are due, and from 
whose absence so many virtues date. He fled from it; 
flinging it away from him with a firm hand, not daring to 
stay to test his strength by pausing in its presence. He 
fled on and on, in the still gray twilight gloom,' through the 
dense, silent forest, its trembling leaves, and falling dews, 

33 


VOL. JI. 


386 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


and evening shadows; he fled on under the gaunt boughs 
and tangled aisles of the woodland ; all the darkest pas- 
sions of his nature warring and rioting within him. Dizzy 
with the whirling of his brain, every nerve in his mind and 
body strung to tension, quivering and throbbing with the 
fierce torture of the ordeal past, he flung himself, half- 
conscious, on the cool fresh turf with a cry of agony and 
thanksgiving. 

The last faint sun-glow faded from the west, the silver 
cimeter of the young moon rose over the forest, the twi- 
light deepened, and the night came down on Fontainebleau, 
veiling town and woodland, lake and palace, in its soft and 
hallowing light; still he lay upon the turf under the beech- 
trees, exhausted with the conflict and the struggle of the 
great passions at war within him; worn out with that fell 
struggle with Temptation, where submission had been so 
easy, victory so hard. And as the twilight shadows deep- 
ened round him, and the dews gathered thicker on the 
whispering leaves, and the numberless soft voices of the 
night chimed through the silent forest glades, he thanked 
God that his heart was free, his hands stainless, from the 
guilt which, if never known by his fellow-men, would yet 
have haunted him with its horrible presence throughout 
his life, poisoned the purest air he breathed, turned the 
fairest heaven that smiled on him into a hell, waked him 
from his sweetest sleep to start and shudder at the chill 
touch of remembered crime, and cursed his dying bed with 
a horror that would have pursued him to the very borders 
of his grave. He thanked God that for once in his life he 
had resisted the mad temptation of the hour, and thrust 
away the devil of Thought ere it had time to fester into 
Deed ; he thanked God that the dead weight of a human 
life was not upon his soul, to rise and drive him, Orestes- 
like, from eveiy haven of rest, to damn him in his softest 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


387 


hours of joy, to make him shrink from the light of heaven, 
and tremble at the rustle of the forest trees, and quail be- 
fore the innocent and holy beauty of the earth be nad 
crimsoned with his guilt. He thanked God with passion- 
ate gladness and trembling awe at the peril past — that he 
could meet the innocent eyes of the woman he loved with- 
out that secret on his soul — that he could take her hands 
without staining them with the guilt on his — that he could 
hold her to his heart without the deadly presence of that 
crime with which, to win her, he would have darkened 
earth and burdened both their lives. He thanked God 
that he could stand there in the solemn aisles of the 
Forest Temple free at least from the curse of that terrible 
crime, and feel the soft wind fan his hair, and hear the 
sweet sighing of the woodland boughs, and look upward 
to the fair, calm heavens bending over him in the solemn 
and holy stillness of the night without the myriad voices 
of the earth calling on him to answer for the crime into 
which his passions had hurried him, and rising up sileni; 
but ruthless witnesses against him — that he could stand 
there under the fair evening stars, free, saved, stainless 
from the guilt that had tempted him in the darkest hour of 
his life, able to look up with a clear brow and a fearless 
conscience into the pure and holy eyes of night 1 


388 


GRANVILLE D£ VIGNE. 


PART THE TWENTY-SEV'ENTH. 


I. 


FIDELITY. 

It is strange how the outer world surrounds yet never 
touches the inner ; how the gay and lighter threads of life 
intervene yet never mingle with those that are darkest and 
sternest, as the parasite clings to the forest tree, united yet 
ever dissimilar! From the twilight gloom of the silent 
forest, from solitude and temptation and sulFering, from the 
fell torture of an hour when thought and opportunity, 
twin tempters, lured him on to crime, De Yigne passed 
suddenly into the glitter and glow and brilliance, the light 
laughter and the ringing jests, and the peopled salons of 
the Diaman du Foret. From the dense woods and the 
stirless silence of the night, only haunted by the presence 
of the woman who had cursed his rTe and well-nigh lured 
him to irrevocable and ineffaceable guilt, he came by abrupt 
transition into a gay and brilliant society, from which all 
somber shadows were banished, and where its groups, 
laughing, jesting, flirting, carrying on the light intrigues 
of the hour, seemed for the time as though no sorrow or 
suffering, bitterness or passion, had ever intruded among 
them. Strange contrast! those glittering salons and that 
dark and deadly solitude of the beech woods of the Gros 
Fouteau — not stranger than the contrast between the 
coarse, cruel, hateful face that had lured him to crime and 
misery in the dense shadow of the forest gloom, and the 
one, delicate, high-bred, impassioned, with its radiant, 
earnest regard, and its gleaming, golden hair, on which he 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


3S9 


<ookcd as, when away from the gayety and the glitter, the 
gossip and the mots, the light laughter and the subdued 
murmur of society, he drew her, after awhile, unnoticed, 
out on to the terrace which overlooked the wooded and 
stately gardens of the Diaman du Foret, where the moon- 
beams slept on lawn and lake, avenue and statue, in the 
calm May night, that shrouded Fontainebleau, town and 
palace and forest, in its silvery mist. 

Neither of them spoke; love, memory, thought were too 
deep and too full in both for words, and neither could have 
found voice to utter all that arose in their hearts at the 
touch of each other’s hand, the gaze of each other’s eyes, 
the sense of each other’s presence. 

Dark and heavy upon them was the weight of that past 
hour. Silent they stood together in the solitude of the 
night that was calm, hushed, and peaceful, fit for a love 
either more tranquil or more fully blessed than theirs. 

His voice was hoarse and broken as he spoke at last, 
bowing his head over her. 

“You can love me — after this?” 

She did not answer him, she only lifted her eyes to his 
face. By the silvery gleam of the night he could see the 
unswerving fidelity, after all, through all, promised him for 
all eternity while her heart should beat and her eyes have 
life to gaze upon his face. 

■ Words were all too feeble and too chill to thank her; 
he bowed his head and pressed his lips on hers. Now ho 
knew, never again to doubt it, how unwearingly and how 
entirely this imperishable and unselfish love that he had 
won would cling round him to his dying day. The night 
was still ; not a murmur stirred among the trees, not a 
breath moved upon the surface of the little lake, not a 
cloud swept across the pale, pure stars, gleaming beyond 
in the blue heavens The earth was hushed in deep rc- 

33* 3c 


390 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


pose, nature slept the solemn and tranquil sleep which no 
fret and wrath of man has power to w^eaken or arrest; 
while he, the mortal, with human love trembling on his 
lips, and human suffering quivering in his heart, told in 
broken earnest words to the woman who would cling to 
him through all, the confession of that dire temptation 
which so nearly had ripened into crime. He laid his heart 
bare to her, with all its sins and weaknesses, its errors and 
its impulses, fearlessly, truthfully, because she had taught 
him at last that the love that is love will not shrink from 
its idol because it finds him mortal, but rather, should his 
errors be deeper than his fellows, veil them with tender 
touch, and cling but the firmer and the closer to him in the 
valley of the shadow of death. He laid his heart bare to 
her as be had never done to any living thing, knowing that 
his trust was sacred, secure of sympathy, and tenderness, 
and pity. He spoke to her as men can never speak to 
men, as they can seldom speak to women. He told her of 
that deadly Temptation, that darker nature born in him, 
as more or less in all, which had slumbered unknown, till 
opportunity awoke it, and then, aroused in all its force, had 
wrestled so hardly with all that was merciful, gentle, and 
better in him. He told her of that fell Tempter of thought 
which had arisen so suddenly in night and solitude, and whis- 
pered him to a deed that would give him back his freedom, 
avenge his wrongs, and shatter the fetters that weighed 
him down with their unmerited burden. He told how he 
had fled from it, bow he had conquered it, how he had 
escaped with pure hands and stainless soul to render thanks 
to God for his deliverance in the solemn forest-aisles of 

that temple where man best meets the mystery of Deity 

the great temple of the universe which human hands never 
fashioned, and human creeds, and follies, and priestcraft 
cannot enter to lower and pollute 


GRANVILLE DE V.GNE. 


S91 


He told her, laying bare to her all that was darkest iu 
liim, all the deadly crime begotten in his heart, and so 
well-nigh wrought by his hand into the black guilt with 
which one human life stifles and tramples out another. He 
‘old her, concealing nothing; then, again, he asked her* 

“Can you love me — after this?” 

She lifted up her face, that was white as death where 
the light of the moon shone upon it; and her voice was 
low and tremulous, yet sustained with the great heroic 
tenderness that did not shrink from him in his sin, that did 
not recoil from him in his fell temptation, that forgot and 
washed out its own wrong in the deep waters of an ex- 
haustless love. 

“I shall love you while I have life! I have said it; I 
can say no more. Let the world condemn you — you are 
the dearer to me! Our love can be no crime in God’s 
sight.” 

He crushed her closer in his arms. 

“Crime! Great Heaven! You are my wife in heart. 
Such love as yours binds us with stronger force, and con- 
secrates holier tie, than any priestcraft can ever forge. 
She is not my wife in the sight of Heaven. Reason, right, 
sense, justice, all divorced her from the very hour I left her 
at the altar, my bitter enemy, my relentless foe, who won 
me by deceit, who would have made my life a hell, who 
renders me a devil, not a man ! She my wife ! Great God, 
I renounce her ! Let men prate of their laws and of her 
rights how they choose ” 

Alma, as the fierce words were muttered in his throat, 
clung to him, her voice low and dreamy, like the voice of 
one in feverish pain. 

“She is no wife of yours — a woman that could hate you 
and betray you ! She is no wife of yours— a woman whom 
you lett at the altar! How can they bind you to her?” 


392 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“ They may 1 — 1 care not, save that she holds the name 
that should be yours. This was all that was wanting to 
fill up the measure of my hate for her. Let fools go bab- 
ble of her claims upon me if they will. From the hour we 
parted at the altar I never saw her face until this night; 
from this night I divorce her before God. She is no wife 
of mine; her rights are mere legal quibbles, love never 
forged, fidelity never sanctified, God never blessed them. 
I claim my heritage of justice as a man — my right to live, 
to love, to taste the common happiness of my fellows. 
The very birds around us find their mates. Why are we, 
alone of all the earth, to be wrenched apart, and con- 
demned to live and die asunder ? Why are we, alone, to 
be forced to surrender all that makes life of joy and value ? 
Alma ! — surely we love well enough to defy the world to- 
gether 

He paused abruptly, his frame shook with the great 
passions in him, which were stronger than his strength ; 
the words broke from him unawares — the words that would 
decide their fate ! Her face was flushed to a deep scarlet 
glow as he looked down on it by the silvery light of the 
moon, her hands closed tighter upon his, her lip quivered, 
and he felt her slight, delicate form tremble in his arms. 
She clung closer to him still, her breathing hurried and 
low, like broken, rapid sighs; her eyes, humid and dark as 
night, fell beneath his; that one word, “together,” stirred 
the depths of her heart as the storm-winds the depth of 
the sea. Two years before she would have scarce com- 
prehended the extent of the sacrifice asked of her more 
than Mignon or Haidee, scarce known more fully than 
they all it called on her to surrender. Now she knew its 
meaning: knew that this man, who was thus pitilessly 
cursed for no crime, no error, but simply for a mistake — 
the fatal and irrevocable mistake of early marriage — would 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


893 


be condemned by the world if he took his Just heritage ol 
freedom ; knew that, for a divine compassion, an imperish- 
able love, she, who clung to him, would be laid by social 
law beneath a social ban, would be forbid by it from every 
sphere and every honor that were her due by birth, by in- 
tellect, by right. She knew her sacrifice ; she knew that 
she should decide the destiny of her whole future; and tlie 
proud nature, though strong enough to defy both, was one 
to abhor any free glance, to resent every scornful word : 
the haughty and delicate spirit was one to feel keenly, 
yielding one inch of her just place. But — she loved, and 
the world was far from her; she loved, and her life lay in 
his. Fidelity is the marriage-bond of God ; the laws o+ 
man cannot command it, the laws of man are void without 
it. Would she not render it unto him, even to her grave? 
Would she not be his wife in the sight of Heaven? Suf- 
fering for him would be proudly borne, sacrifice to him 
would be gladly given. She would have followed him to 
the darkness of the tomb ; she would have passed with him 
through the furnace of the fires, content, always content, 
so that her hands were closed on his, so that she had 
strength to look up to his face. 

This is sin, say you? Verily, if it be so, it is the sub- 
limest sin that ever outshone, virtue ! 

He bent his head lower and lower, and his words were 
hoarse and few. 

“Can you love me — enough for this? Alma! we cari’ 
not part 1” 

He felt a shudder as of icy cold run through his frame 
at that last ghastly word, as she lay folded in his embrace. 
By the white light of the moon he saw the scarlet blush 
upon her face waver, and burn, and deepen ; quick, tremu- 
lous sighs heaved her heart ; her arms wreathed and twined 
closer and closer about him; her eyes gleamed with an 


394 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


undying and eternal love, as they met his own in the pale< 
soft radiance of the stars. 

“We cannot parti You are my world, my all I Your 
will is mine !” 

The words were spoken that gave her to him. 

The whisper died away, scarce stirring the air; the love 
that trembled in it was too deep for speech ; the fevered 
flush upon her face glowed warm, then changed to a mar- 
ble whiteness. She clung to him closer still, and passion- 
ate tears, born from the strong emotions of the hour, 
welled slowly up, and fell from those eyes which she had 
first lifted to his when she was a little child, flinging 
flowers at him in the old library at Weivehurst. She 
loved him, she pitied him ; she would forsake all to give 
him back that happiness of which another’s fraud had 
robbed him. She thought of nothing then save him ; and 
if he had stretched out his hand and bade her follow him 
into the dark, cold shadows of the grave, she would have 
gone with him fondly, fearlessly, unselfishly, still thinking 
only of him ; what comfort she could give, what trial share, 
what pain avert. She loved him. The world, I say, was 
very far from Alma then — as far as the fret, and noise, and 
bustle of the city streets are from the fair and solemn stars 
of heaven. 

And in the stillness of the night their lips met. She 
would give up the world for him. 

One oath De Yigne had sworn as he lay on his sick-bed 
at Scutari, to revenge — before he surrendered himself to 
any love or any happiness — to revenge on Yane Castleton 
the insult with which he had outraged every sentiment of 
delicacy, chivalry, or honor, and brand him, so that the 
stain could never leave his name, as coward and as sct'un- 
drel. He swore afresh to do it before Alma’s name wua 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


895 


finked in any way with his own, and the Trefusis’s words 
in the forest that night had spurred his resolve into still 
steadier purpose. He left the Diamau du Foret that night, 
to return straight to England and work out what he held 
a primary and paramount obligation — the chastisement of 
the brute insult with which the woman he loved had been 
outraged. To her he said nothing of his errand, leaving 
her, indeed, in ignorance that he would not be with her on 
the morrow ; but, ere he quitted Paris by the earliest train 
in the gray morning, he wrote to her from Meurice’s words 
his honor bade him write — words that he could not find 
strength to utter while her kiss was on his cheek, while 
her heart was prisoned against his own. Even to pen 
them while the dawn was still and cold about him, and he 
sat in the silence of his own solitary chamber, was hard to 
him in the rapture that coursed through his veins, and 
steeped his life in one golden, intoxicating joy, at the 
single thought, ^^She will he — cost him a bitter 

effo^-t in the delirium of an hour in which his one keen, 
stinging regret, that he must take some sacrifice from the 
woman who loved him, was lost and forgot, as the throb 
of departing pain is barely heeded in the delicious languor 
of the Morphine, that yields us voluptuous ease after long 
and weary torture. 

These were the final words he wrote : 

“I must leave you for a few hours — a few days at 
farthest. One who loved you more unselfishly perhaps 
than I, bade me in his dying hour try, if I found you again 
to leave you forever. It is easy to counsel ; but, great 
Heaven I to bid a man renounce the only earthly treasure 
he has, at the very hour he has recovered it — who could 
have strength to do it ? I, at the least, have none. I am 
no stoic, no god. Alma ! — the man you love is very mor- 
tal. Yes — one last word. Do not give yourself to me 


396 


GRANVILLE DE \nGNE. 


witlioat weighing well what it may cost you. Selfish 1 
may be, God knows ; though all I ask or seek is the hap- 
piness that is the commonest heritage of men, till their 
wrongs, or their errors, or their follies lose them their 
birthright forever! But I am not so utterly blind to all 
that is generous and just as to lead you, for my own sake, 
to such a sacrifice without bidding you pause to decide 
whether or no it will be recompensed to you by the sole 
reward that I can give it — my love and my fidelity. Think 
of it well; do not let one memory of me sway you in your 
decision. If it be only your divine pity, your sympathy 
in my fate, your unselfish wish to give me the joy that my 
own headlong folly has lost me, that prompts you, do not 
sacrifice yourself for me. I have brought the burden upon 
you, it is meet that I should bear it alone, rather than lead 
you, in your noble generosity, your trustful faith, to a sac- 
rifice for me that in after-life you would look back on with 
regret. Such a one I could not, I would not, take from 
you. Weigh it well. Let no thought or pity for me 
sway you ; weigh well, whether your love for me is really 
great enough to make life with me sufficient compensation 
for all else. And if, indeed, it he great enough for this, 
your life shall be a heaven upon earth, if man’s tenderness 
can make it so ; my love, God knows, you know, will 
never swerve !” 


II. 

NEMESIS. 

Lord Yane Castleton sat in his chamber in his cham- 
bres garnis, in St. James’s Street, where he dwelt during 
the season, when he was not at that “evil cage'’ of his— 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


397 


as tlie old woodsman had termed it — his villa at Windsor, 
where a woman’s hand had struck him for a coward’s deed. 
He sat in his chamber wrapped in his dressing-gown, smok- 
ing, breakfasting, reading the papers, and chatting with two 
of his particular chums, who had dropped in prior to driv- 
ing down to see the Ascot Cup race run. They were talk- 
ing of everything under the sun, at least the sun that shone 
on the West-end: of the chances of the field against the 
favorite ; of the new ballet, and certain ankles that came 
out very strong in it; of the beauty of Coralie Coquelicot, 
alias Sarah Boggis, a new planet in the orbit of casinos; 
of the last escapade of that very fast little lionne, Leila 
Puflfdoff; of Sabretasche’s marriage, of which, by the way, 
I heard no less than a hundred and seventy-two on dils, 
the concluding and most charitable one being that of a 
little lady, well known in the religious as well as in the 
fashionable world, who whispered that his wife, poor dear 
innocent thing! had been put hors de vue in Naples by a 
stiletto, hired for that noble purpose by the Colonel’s 
wealth. No one knew it, of course, but it was but too 
true, she feared ! They were chatting over all the topics 
of their day as they smoked and breakfasted. Castleton 
was hardly up to the mark that morning ; he was annoyed 
and irritated at several things: first, that he had serious 
doubts as to the soundness of Lancer’s off-leg, and if 
Lancer did not come in at the distance winner of the 
Cup, Lord Vane’s prospects would look blacker than 
would be desirable; in the second, the ministry had be- 
haved with the grossest ingratitude to its staunch ally, 
the house of Tiara, by refusing him, through his father, 
a certain post he coveted, a piece of ill-natured squeam- 
ishness on their part, as they had but lately given a 
deanery to his brother, a spirit rather worse than him- 
self; in the fourth, a larger number of little bills were 

VOL. II. 34 


398 


GRANV^TLLE DE VTGNE. 


floalin^ about than was pleasant, and if there was not 
speedily a general election, by which he could slip into 
one of those neat little boroughs that were honored by 
being kept in his Grace of Tiara’s pocket, he was likely 
to be troubled with more applications than he could, not 
alone meet — of that he never thought — but stave off to 
some dim future era. Altogether, Oastleton was not in 
an over good humor that morning; had sworn at his 
valet, and lashed his terrier till it howled for mercy, and 
found everything at cross purposes and a bore, from his 
chocolate, which was badly milled, to the news he had 

lately heard, that “the Little Tressillian had come 

into some money, and had been taken up by old Moly- 
neux,’’ news which gave him some nasty qualms, for “she’s 
a confounded plucky, skittish, hard-mouthed little devil,” 
thought he, “and if the story of that cursed folly of mine 
ever get afloat, it’ll do me no end of mischief; and if she 
go and tell people about it — and they’ll listen to her now 
she’s a little money and Helena has taken her up — I shall 
never hear the last of it. It would be an infernal case for 
the y)apers. She must be put a stop to, somehow — bat 
how?” Which knotty point occupied Lord Vane (who 
detested Alma with as much vindictiveness as an exceed- 
ingly vindictive nature was capable of : first, for her words ; 
secondly, for her blow; and thirdly, for her escaping and 
outwitting him) more than even the coming trial between 
Lancer and the field. So altogether Lord Vane was not 
in a good humor; he swore at his chocolate, he cursed the 
Times — that had just been browbeating the Duke of Tiara 
out of the ministry — he snarled at his friends, he dressed 
for Ascot, all in an exceedingly bad humor, and he was 
not in a better when, on issuing from his chamber to go 
to the drag that awaited him in the street below, he came 
suddenly face to face with the man he hated because he 
vas the man that Alma Tressillian loved 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


399 


They mot abrnptly on tlie stairs as the one was quitting, 
the other approaching, the landing-place — they met ab- 
ruptly, with barely a foot between them — De Yigne and 
Vane Castleton; he who had insulted her past all forgive- 
ness, and he who would not have seen a hair of her head 
injured without revenging it. Involuntarily, they both 
stood silent for a moment. De Yigne looked at him, 
every vein in him tingling with passion, as he saw the 
man who had given him two years of torture — who had 
insulted the woman he idolized with his brutal love, his 
loathed caresses — who had put her name into the lips of 
other men, coupled with lies that leveled her with any 
other of his worthless fancies. He looked at him, recall- 
ing all that she had told him had been poured into her 
young ear in that horrible hour when she was in Yane 
Castleton’s clutches. He looked at him; his lips pale, 
and set with a stern, fixed purpose; his large dark eyes 
burning with the hatred that was rioting within him ; his 
right hand clinching hard on the riding-switch he held, as 
if he longed to change it into a deadlier and more danger- 
ous weapon. Such insults as Yane Castleton had passed 
on Alma would have stirred the meekest peace-maker 
under heaven into righteous wrath, and armed the hand 
of the most spiritless, if it had had the least drop of manly 
blood or the least fiber of manly muscle in its veins and 
sinews. No wonder, then, that De Yigne, quick as David 
of Israel to wrath, with dark passions born in him from 
his fathers, the men of the old time, when a stainless 
shield was borne by an iron hand, and all wrongs were 
redressed with steel — hot in thought, quick in action, ab- 
horring all that was mean, ungenerous, and cowardly — felt 
all that was fiercest and most fiery in his nature rise up in 
Its strongest wrath when he stood face to face with the 
man who Lad tried to rob him of the woman he loved* 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


iOO 

Ele seemed to hear his hateful love-vows, and Alma’s pite- 
ous cry of terror and supplication ; he seemed to see the 
loathsome caress with which he had dared to touch her 
pure soft lips, and the blow which her little delicate fingers 
had struck him in self-defense ; he seemed to feel her strug- 
gling, as if for life or death, in the vulture clutches of her 
hated foe. What wonder that his hand clinched on his 
riding-whip, as if thirsting for that surer and deadlier 
weapon with which, in other days, his grandsires had 
defended their honor and their love I 

Yane Castleton was no coward — had he been, the Tiara 
blood, bad though it might be in other ways, would have 
disowned him — he was no coward, yet at the eagle eyes 
that flashed so suddenly upon him, his own fell involunta- 
rily for an instant, but only for an instant. He recovered 
himself in time to have the first word. He pushed his 
fine, fair curls olf his low, white brow, with a sneer on his 
lips and in his cold, light eyes : 

“ He Yigne ! My dear fellow, how are you ? Didn’t 
know you were in England. Come to rest yourself from 
that deuced hard campaign, eh ?” 

“No,” said De Yigne between his teeth, which were set 
like a lion’s at the sight of his foe. “ I am come for a 
harder task — to try and teach a scoundrel what honor and 
dishonor mean 1” 

His tones were too significant to leave Castleton in any 
doubt as to the application of his words. He drew in his 
lips with a nervous, savage twitch, and his light-blue eyes 
grew cold and angry. Ho laughed, with a forced sneer. 

“Jealous! Are you come to bully me about that little 
girl of yours — little — what was her name — Trevanion, Tre- 
velyan, Tressillian — something with a Tre, I know ? Really, 
you will waste your wrath and your powder. I have nothing 
whatever to do with hi'jr; she did not take me in, thongn 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


40 » 

every one knows Major De Vigne, wise as he counts 
himself, fancied that consummate little intrigante a mode^ 
of fidelity ” 

The words had barely passed his lips — he could not 
finish his sentence — before De Yigne’s grasp was on him, 
tight, firm, relentless; he might with as much use have 
tried to escape from the iron jaws of a tiger seeking his 
prey as from the grasp of the man who loved Alma Tres- 
sillian. De Yigne’s face was white with passion, his eyes 
burning with fiery aijger, the wrath that was in him quiver- 
ing and thrilling in every vein and sinew — to hear her 
name on that liar’s lips ! He seized him in his iron grasp, 
and shook him like a little ‘dog. 

“Blackguard I that is the last of your dastard lies you 
shall ever dare to utter. You are too low for the revenge 
one man of honor takes upon another ; you are only fit to 
be punished as one punishes a yelping mongrel or a sneak- 
ing hound.” 

Holding him there, powerless, in the grip of his right 
hand, he thrashed him with his riding-switch as a man 
would thrash a cur — thrashed him with all the passion that 
was in him, till the little whip snapped in two. Then he 
lifted him up, as one would lift a dead rat or a broken 
bough, and threw him down the whole stone flight of the 
staircase: in his wrath, he seemed to have the strength of 
a score of giants. 

Castleton lay at the foot of the stairs, stunned and in- 
sensible. His valet and the people of the house gazed on 
the scene, too amazed to interrupt it or aid him. His two 
friends, standing in the street criticising the four roans in 
his drag, rushed in at the echo of the fall. De Yigno 
stepped over his body, giving it a spurn with his foot as he 
passed 


34 * 


402 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


^‘Tlie deviJ, De Yigne I” began one of them. “What’s 
up — what’s amiss I”’ 

De Vigne laughed — a haughty sneer upon his face : 

“Only a little lesson given to your friend, Lord Monck- 
ton. Few will disagree with me in thinking it wanted ; if 
they do, I can always be heard of at White’s or the United. 
Good day to you I” 

As he walked out into the street to his horse, which was 
waiting for him, a small, sleek, fair man, with a dandified 
badine, and a generally showy get-up, altogether in ap- 
pearance extremely like a hairdresser who passes himself 
off as a baron, or a banker’s clerk who tries to look like a 
man of fashion — De Yigne’s ex-valet and Crimean corre- 
spondent, the man Raymond, who had been turned away 
two years before for reading Alma’s letter — came up to 
him with that deferential ceremoniousness which would 
have fitted him for a groom of the chambers. 

“I beg your pardon. Major, for intruding upon you; 
but might I be allowed to inquire whether you received a 
letter from me when you were before Sebastopol?” 

De Yigne signed him away with the broken handle of his 
whip : 

“When I discharge my servants, I do not expect to be 
followed and annoyed with their impertinence.” 

“I mean no impertinence. Major,” persisted the man, 
“and I should not be likely to intrude upon you without 
some warrant, sir. Did you read my letter ?” 

“Read it? Do you suppose I read the begging-letters 
with which rogues pester me ? It is no use to waste your 
words here. Take yourself off I” 

He spoke haughtily and angrily, as he put his foot in the 
stirrup; he remembered the share Raymond, then in Cas- 
tleton’s employ, had taken in that vile plot against Alma; 
but he would not degrade her by bringing her name up to 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


403 


a servant, and lower both her and himself by stooping to _ 
resent the mere hired villainy of Castleton’s abettor. 

“It was not a begging-letter, Major,” said Raymond, 
with a slight smile. “It would have told you something 
of great importance to you, sir, if you had chosen to read 
it. I can tell it you still, sir, and it is what you would bid 
any price to hear.” 

“Silence!” said De Yigne, as he threw himself across 
the saddle, turning his head to bis own groom. “Ashley, 
give that man in charge ; he is annoying me I” 

De Yigne shook the bridle from his grasp, and rode 
away up St. James’s Street. 

“I have horsewhipped him, that stain will cling to him 
forever; but, by Heaven! if I had let my passions loose, 

I could have killed him,” he muttered to himself, as he 
galloped down Pall Mall, bestowing no more thought ou 
his quondam valet in the passion that still flamed in him 
despite his vengeance. 

He could have slain him, “if God restrained not,” and 
his own principle had not held the curb upon his wrath, as 
in that horrible night-hour in the forest of Fontainebleau. 
He could have slain him, the man who would have robbed 
him of his one earthly treasure ; who had robbed him of 
her for two years. He could have slain him, the man who 
had polluted her name by association with his ; who had 
tried to win her by fraud and insult; who had dared to 
lure her by the love he knew she bore another into his own 
cruel and hateful trap ; who had dared to touch those 
young lips, stainless as any rose-leaves with the dew of 
dawn upon them, with his loathed and brutal caresses. 
He could have slain him, as Moses slew the Egyptian, iu^ 
the fiery wrath and hatred of the moment; but he re- 
frained, as David refrained from slaying Saul, when the 
man who had wronged him lay in his power, sleeping and 


404 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


defenseless, in the still gloom of midnight. Oh ! mea 
freres, virtue lies not, as some think, in being too pure for 
temptation to enter into us, but rather in proportion to the 
strength, the seduction, and the power of the temptation 
we resist If there be such to whom like temptation never 
come, happy for them, their path through life is safe and 
easy. If they never know the delicious perfume of the 
rose-garland, they never know the bitterness of the fennel 
and amarinth ; yet closer to human sympathies and dearer 
to human hearts — nobler, warmer, more natural — is the 
man who loves and hates, errs, struggles, and repents; is 
quick to joy and quick to pain; who may do wrong in 
haste, but is ever ready to atone, and who, though passing 
through the fire of his own thoughts, comes like gold 
worthier from the furnace. 

Yane Castleton rose from that fall, sunk and degraded 
in his own eyes forever, with such a hell raging in his own 
heart as might have satisfied the direst vengeance. He 
had been thrashed by Granville De Yigne as a hound by 
its keeper; he knew that stigma would cling to him as 
long as he lived. Monckton, his valet, his groom, the 
people of the house, all had seen it; seen him powerless in 
De Yigne’s grasp ; seen him held and lashed, like a yelping 
puppy in a hunting-field. The tale would be told in circles 
of all classes; it would spread like wildfire. No food so 
dear to the generality as gossip — above all, gossip spiced 
with scandal — it would be known in his club, in his clique, 
all over town. He could not lounge into White’s or the 
Guards’ Club without the men knowing he had been horse- 
whipped by De Yigne — De Yigne, a man too popular and 
too esteemed for others to discredit or condemn him. 
Horsewhipped — the blackest, least irremediable stigma that 
can lie upon a man, branding him a coward whom another 
has treated as a dog. When he rose, bruised, sore, with 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


405 


the white foam of anger on his lips, and the lash of De 
Vigne’s riding-switch tingling and smarting on his shoulders, 
stung at last with the punishment of his own deeds, he — ■ 
who had prided himself on his vices as other men on their 
virtues, who had done what he chose without paying or ac- 
counting for it to any one, who had earned for himself the 
sobriquet of '‘Butcher,’' for the unscrupulous cruelty with 
which he cleared everything that lay in his path away from 
it, heedless of mercy or justice — he had been punished for 
a lie and an insult — punished with such chastisement as 
do what he would, would cling to his name, making it 
shame to him and ridicule to others as long as his life should 
last. Monckton lost no time in detailing, in that hot-bed 
of gossipry, a club-room, how “that dare-devil De Yigne 
pitched into poor Vane. Some row about a woman — I 
don't know who ; but I can swear to the severity of the 
thrashing; and he kicked him afterward, by Jove I he did. 
Somebody should send it to the papers !” 

Old Tiara, the rascally old man who. Heaven knows, had 
no business to throw pebbles at anybody — but it is always 
those who live in the most shattered glass houses that are 
most busy at that exploit — old Tiara, meeting him in St. 
James’s Street, pushed him aside with his cane. 

“I don’t know you, sir, and if I did I wouldn’t walk the 
length of the street with you, unless the club windows 
were empty.” Chuckling in himself, too, as he said it; 
for if his son’s humiliation was unpalatable to him as the 
first of Tiara blood that had ever had such a taint upon 
it — for if they were bad they were game — to humiliate 
Rim himself was sweet and highly amusing to the old man, 
who had learned in youth of Queensberry and Alvanley, 
Pierrepoint and Brummel, and found the same pleasure in 
a sharp answer as his chaplain would have told him to do 
io a soft one. 


Zd 


406 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


Alma Tressilliaa was amply revenged. Castleton’a 
debts, his diflBculties, his mal odor in general, crowned by 
the story of his horsewhipping — a horsewhipping that he 
did not dare revenge, because of the evil deed that was the 
loot of the quarrel, would make England too warm, or 
rather too cold, for him. He could not stay in town, cut 
by every man worth knowing ; all his daily haunts, the 
club, the Ring, Pall Mall, and St. James’s Street, would be 
filled by old acquaintance, who would either drop him 
entirely, or shake him off as plainly as they could ; every 
house where he was wont to dine or lounge away his hours 
would be full of the story that Major De Vigne had thrashed 
him for an abominable insult to some woman ; town would 
be closed to Castleton as effectually as though everybody 
had ostracized him. There were only left him casinos and 
Cafes Regences, sharpers and black-legs, and cut by his 
own father, and sent to Coventry by his own brothers, he 
slunk out of London and out of England. He lives at 
Paris and the Bads, devoting himself, I believe, to extraor- 
dinary skillful ecarte, to roulette and trente et quarante ; 
his society is not what one of the ducal house of Tiara 
might reasonably expect, and they tell me there is no more 
dangerous hand at trapping young pigeons, and fleecing 
them of all their valuable feathers, than Lord Vane Cas- 
tleton. It is rather an unworthy ofiice for one of his order, 
but chacun a leur gout, and a man if he be by nature a 
coward and a bully, dishonest and dishonorable, will grow 
up so, whether he was born in an ivory cradle or a strolling 
player’s baiM. Nature will out, and it will have the best 
of the game — unless education be powerful indeed, and 
BO — Vane Castleton, with a great name, a good position, 
and every chance to make fair running in the race of life 
if he had chosen, born with the nature of the bully, the 
coward, and the sharper in him, sank at last, despite all, to 
their level. 


GHANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


407 


PART THE TWENTY-EIGHTH. 

I. 


HOW FREEDOM CAME AT LAST. 

When De Yigne went back to the hotel, he found a 
letter from his steward, asking him to go down to Yigne, 
where business matters required his absolute and personal 
attention. He read the letter, put it down, and thought a 
minute over its contents. Yigne was hateful to him; he 
had never been there since he had quitted it on that fatal 
New Year’s Day which had bound him to Constance Tre- 
fusis. Every association connected with it was one of keen 
and stinging pain, interwoven as they were with the one 
great irremediable mistake and misery of his life. One 
place, indeed, was dear and sacred to him — that one green 
grave under the shadowy elms, where his mother lay ; but 
even there lingered and haunted bitter regret and vain 
remorse, since it was his folly, his headstrong and willful 
passion, which had sent her there — the mother whom he 
had loved so tenderly from the early hours when, as a 
young boy, he had loved to lean against her knee, sitting 
under the very shadow of those elms that now sheltered 
her grave under their fostering foliage. Yigne was full 
of dark and bitter memories to him ; he had not visited it 
now for eleven long years, exiled from his ancestral home 
by the gaunt specter of the folly which there had first clung 
around his life, to bear him such after-fruits of misery. Yet 
now, whether Alma’s love had made life bear a different 
coloring, he felt a vague wish and longing to see the old 
home where his careless childhood and his happy youth 


40S 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


nad passed ; the home where so many of his forefathers 
had lived; the home — nearest and holiest tie of all — the 
home where his mother had died. Alma would not be in 
England, whither she was coming with the Molyneux, for 
two days ; if he should go and dwell with her in Italy or 
Southern France, he wished to see the old elm woods of 
Vigne before he left the country; he wished to see his 
mother’s grave — his mother, the only woman that had 
ever loved him purely, devotedly, unselfishly, till Alma, 
poor child ! spent all her wealth of love on him. Some- 
thing impelled him to go down to Yigne as strongly as he 
had before loathed even the mention of revisiting it. That 
day he threw himself into the train, and went down to 
spend twenty-four hours under that roof where he had 
once slept the sweet, untroubled, dreamless sleep of child- 
hood ere he knew the bitter sorrow and the delirious joys 
of manhood. They did not know he was coming, and there 
was no welcome for him, (so best, he could ill have borne 
it, remembering how he had quitted it;) there was only the 
flag flying from the west turret because he was returned in 
safety from the Crimea, and the old lodge-keeper’s recog- 
nition of him as she looked into his face and burst into 
tears, for she had worshiped him from his birth, (though 
De Vigne, in his wayward, mischievous, high-spirited, care- 
for-nothing childhood, must have been a very troublesome 
divinity,) and had never thought to see him again before 
she laid her aged bones to rest. The old familiar things 
came with a strange thrill of memory upon him. Every 
turn of the approaeh — the shadowy double avenue, with 
its giant elms swaying their massive boughs backward 
and forward in the sunlight ; the great sweep of park and 
woodland, forest and pasture, stretching away farther than 
the eye could reach ; the clear, sweet ripple of the river 
rushing under the hawthorns, white as new-fallen snow; 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


40S 


the scamper of the startled hares under the fan-like ferns; 
the distant belling of the rare red deer, trooping under the 
arching trees in the blue distance ; the grand front of that 
magnificent pile that his ancestors had left him in heritage, 
with its stately terraces and turrets, its stretching lawns 
and gardens — a home too fair to be deserted by its lord 
and left to silence and to solitude — a home that should 
have had revelry in its halls and sweet laughter ringing 
to its stately roof, and love and joy filling its forsaken 
chambers with their soft silvery chimes — all came back 
upon him with a very anguish of memory, such a tighten- 
ing of the heart, as we feel looking on the face of an old 
friend long parted, and tracing the difference in him and 
us since the joyous days of old gone by forever. He loved 
the place, for its own sake ; he had been proud of it, for 
its grand beauty and its historic aroma, when he was yet 
a child, playing, light-hearted, free, and careless under the 
shade of its stately woods. He had loved it until it was 
cursed with the shadow of his unhappy marriage; till 
the dark memory of the woman who had taken his name 
haunted and poisoned the air, and filled every well- remem- 
bered scene of his home with the relentless ghost, ever 
pursuing, never eluded, following in the full glare of a 
noontide sun, as in the voiceless silence of the midnight 
hours; the spirit of an error in judgment, repented of, but 
irremediable : no sin, but what costs us dearer as the world 
goes — a folly. 

That ghost pursued him at each step through all the 
old familiar scenes. He could not enter the great hall 
where he had seen her the first night she came to Yigne, 
standing under the gas glare in her dazzling, voluptuous, 
but ever coarse beauty, with her scarlet wreath over her 
raven hair, and her scarlet cloak flung half oft' from that 
divine form that had won and tempted his eye-love; he 

36 


VOL II. 


ilO GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 

could not mount the wide staircase where he had seen her 
on his marriage-day, her eyes flashing in triumph under 
her bridal-veil, that diamond ceinture round her waist that 
was now turned into gold at the Mont de Piete; he could 
not enter his home, so fair, so stately, with its wide win- 
dows opening on to the sloping lawns and sunny woods 
beyond, that were all, far as the eye could reach, his ; the 
ghost of the Past — the Past which his own madness had 
made, and no power of his could now unmake — haunted 
and pursued him too bitterly I Still less could he have 
entered his mother’s room, undisturbed by his order from 
the day she died ; the chamber sacred to the memory of 
one who had loved him with so rare, so self-denying, so 
infinitely patient, unwearying, and tender a devotion ; the 
mother whom the fruit of his own headlong madness had 
slain from the very depth and strength of her love for her 
wayward and idolized son. 

How fair Yigne looked that day, with the sunlight of 
the budding summer on its white terraces and green wood- 
lands, all around silent and hushed, save the murmur of 
the leaves and the soft rush of the river, and the distant 
belling of the deer that came on the warm, hushed air I It 
was a strangely sad and silent return — a return for twenty- 
four hours ! — to his noble ancestral home after an absence 
of eleven years. It was not so that the lords of Yigne in 
by-gone time came back to their stately manor after fight- 
ing a good fight at Acre or Antioch, Worcester or Edge- 
hill, Blenheim or Ramillies. Alone he turned slowly from 
the house and walked across the park, leaving the grand 
old pile behind him standing on its knoll of velvet turf, 
with its famous elms closing around it, and waving their 

green tree-tops up to the blue clear heavens above a 

home worthy of a royal line, forsaken by its master, and 
left to hirelings and servants in all its fair and stately 


GRANVILLE IJE VIGNE. 


411 


beauty — with its legends of honor, and its memories ot 
glory and of greatness. He left the house and walked 
across the park alone, save an old staghound, well-nigh 
blind, who had leaped upon him at the first sound of his 
step, and who now followed him with measured tread 
across the soft-yielding grass, and under the checkered 
shade that the great forest-trees of Yigne flung across his 
path. He walked across the stretching sunlit park, where 
he had passed so many happy hours as a boy, riding, shoot- 
ing, fishing, lying under the elm-boughs in the dreamy 
beauty of such another summer day as this, thinking to 
himself what a brilliant, glorious, shadowless thing he, De 
Yigne of Yigne, would make of life when he should grow 
to man’s estate. He walked along, strange commingling 
thoughts rushing through his brain of his mother, of Con- 
stance Trefusis, of Alma Tressillian, of his life, so full as 
it had been of adventure and excitement, revelry and sport, 
daring and pleasure — his life so brilliant before that one 
fatal mistake which marred and darkened it, which no\^ 
but for that one error would have been so cloudless, 
crowned as it was with the strong, deep love of manhood, 
and the passionate devotion, the unswerving fidelity of 
such a heart as few men win to beat response to theirs. 
There rose before him the two women who had had so 
much influence upon his life : the one coarse, insolent, lost 
to shame, to mercy, and to decency, who had tempted 
with fifty devils’ force in the dark gloom of the Royal 
Forest, goading him with insult, twitting him with brutal 
jeer, and luring him to murder; the other delicate, refined, 
loving, impassioned, with not a thought he might not read 
in her clear eyes, not a throb of her young heart that did 
not beat for him, leading him with her soft voice, and her 
noble trust, and her unselfish love to a higher, fairer, purer 
life, teaching him faith in human nature. They rose be- 


412 


GRANVILLE DE V^IQNE. 


fore him as he walked along, cutting the ferns and grassei 
as he passed, thought, and memory, and passion all at 
work, his nature as fiery, restless, wayward, impassioned, 
as when, years before, under the elms of Vigue, he had 
wooed the milliner of Frestonhills, the scrub and protegee 
of old Fantyre. lie walked on under the great trees that 
had watched over his race for centuries, bitter thoughts 
rising in him at every step, and stung to keener pain 
rather than softened at the knowledge of the warm, loving 
heart that was so wholly his, and would be his, let him try 
it how he might, or ask what sacrifice he would ; walked 
on until he came to the low ivy-clad fence which parted 
the churchyard from the park of Yigne, and there, under 
the great waving elm-trees, tossing their boughs in the 
summer air, with the lilies and the purple violets clustering 
round its pure white stone, he saw his mother’s grave, the 
simple headstone bearing her name, lying in the soft sum- 
mer sunshine, with the birds singing sweet low requiems 
around, and the church bells swinging slowly through the 
air, and the great elm-boughs sighing a Miserere for her 
whose life had been pure as the lilies, and sweet and 
humble as the violets that clustered round her tomb. And 
here even the living were forgotten in the memory of the 
dead, and De Yigne threw himself down beside the grave, 
calling on her name, as though his voice must waken the 
woman who had loved his slightest whisper, and never 
been deaf to any prayer of his. All the love he had borne 
his mother, all the love she had borne him, rushed upon 
his mind with an anguish of regret; if he had listened to 
her counsel, ever gentle, never ill-timed or unwise, she 
might have been now living, and the curse of his marriage 
would not have been on his life, nor its stain upon his 
name. 

If — ah, if! How much of our life hinges upon if I She 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


413 


had been very dear to him. The sound of her voice, the 
tenderness of her smile — the voice that had never spoken 
harshly to him, that smile that had never failed to welcome 
him ; her gentle nature that his wayward will so often had 
tried; her unwearying affection, which would so fain have 
guarded him from every adverse fate; all that had made, 
his mother beloved and reverent and precious to him ; all 
that had made her words have weight with him in his high- 
spirited, dauntless, self-willed boyhood, when he would 
listen to no other; all that had made her death a remorse 
and a regret that a lifetime would not efface — came back 
upon him in a flood of memories, as he saw the summer 
sunlight glistening on her grave, and felt the bitterness, 
the sharpness, the keen, lasting, cruel sorrow of that mys- 
tery of Death which wrenches a human life so strangely 
from those who would so fain hold it back from that dark 
and ruthless tomb, where no regret, however bitter, can 
follow to atone for wrong, and no voice, however loved, 
can hope to waken a response. 

The sunshine streamed around him, playing fitfully on 
the marble as it fell on it through the parted foliage of 
the overhanging elms. The violets and the lilies of the 
valley filled the air with their fragrance ; the chimes tolled 
out slowly from the old church tower; all was silent 
around him, save the carols of the birds and the myriad 
nameless hushed murmurs and whispers that stir the soli- 
tude of a summer’s day, with the low and solemn voices of 
the earth. In the stillness — where no human eyes looked 
on him — he lay there on the green sods, with the bitter- 
ness of a yearning and futile remorse heavy upon him, as 
he remembered the words of her prophecy, “You will love 
again, to find the crowning sorrow of your life, or drag 
another in to share your curse 1” 

85 * 


414 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


And like tlie cut of a lancet on fresh-opened wounds fell 
words spoken beside him : 

“You are thinking, Major, of what a mistake you made 
eleven years ago, and what a fortune you would give to be 
able to undo it !” 

Such an intruder in such a place — coarse insult by his 
mother’s grave — he, who held his dearest friends at a dis- 
tance from his deeper feelings, to be broken in upon thus 
rudely by such an intruder ! He started up, and swung 
round to meet his ex-valet, Raymond. A deep flush of 
anger rose over his face ; the man quailed before the fire 
that flashed from his eyes, and the chill and bitter fury 
with which his features seemed to change into the set 
coldness of stone, as he motioned him away, too low and 
too contemptible a foe to honor by laying his hand upon 
him. 

“Begone, or your insolence will cost you dear. How 
dare you, you hounli, come before me again.” 

“ Hound I Humph I Wasn’t it true what I said. Major ?” 
asked Raymond, with a smile. “Wouldn’t you give a 
good deal to anybody who made a free man of you again ?” 

Without stopping for a minute to consider what might 
be the import of his words, stung past endurance by the 
impudent leer with which the man dared to address him, 
De Vigne, ever quick to make his muscle do battle for him, 
and apt to revenge insults as his ancestors had used to do 
in ages less polite and — perhaps — less cowardly, seized 
Raymond by his coat-collar — the man’s presence was sacri- 
lege beside his mother’s grave — lifted him up, and flung 
him across the fence on to the grass and ferns and wild 
thyme of the churchyard beyond. 

“ Learn how I bear insult from curs like you I A month 
at the treadmill will do you good.” 

“Bien oblige, monsieur,” muttered Raymond, as 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


415 


gathered himself slowly up from his turfy bed. “Tour 
grasp is no child’s play, Major I But listen one moment, 
sir; do listen. I mean you no insult, by Heaven I don't I 
I ask, because I can tell you what may be of great import- 
ance. If I could' make your wife not your wife, would you 
listen to me then, sir ?” 

Line lightning the blood leapt through his veins at the 
words -‘your wife not your wife.” The simple thought put 
suddenl;^ before him brought with it too strong a rush of 
possible joy, too delicious a vision of what might he, for 
him to heal it camly or retain his self-possession and re- 
serve I” 

“ Not my wife !” he muttered, his voice hoarse and stifled 
in its agony of suspense. “ Good God I Have you war- 
rant for what you say ?” 

“ Full warrant. Major. I can do for you what no divorce 
laws can, thanks to the timorous fools that frame them. 
If those gentlemen were all fettered themselves, they’d 
make the gate go a little easier to open. I can set you 
free, but how I won’t tell you till we come a little to 
terms.” 

Free! Not to Bonnevard, pining in the darkness and 
wretchedness of Chillon, did freedom, even in its simplest 
suggestion, bring such a flood of delirious joy as it brought 
to him. Free I Great Heaven I the very thought mad- 
dened him with eager, impatient, breathless thirst for cer- 
tainty, mingled with the cold, chill, horrible doubt that the 
man was cheating, misleading, and deceiving him. He 
sprang over the fence to his side, and seized him in a grasp 
that he would have vainly striven to shake off. 

“Great Heaven I If you have truth in what you say, 
tell me all— all— at once; do you hear? — all I” 

“Gently, gently. Major,” said Raymond, wincing under 
the grasp that held him as firmly as an iron vice, “ or I 


416 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


snail nave no breath to tell you anything. I can set yod 
*ree, sir; and T[ don’t wonder you wish to be rid of her! 
But before I tell you how, you must tell me if you will 
give me the proper price for information.” 

De Vigne shook him like a little dog. 

“ Scoundrel I Do you think I will make a compact with 
such as you? Out with all you know, and I will reward 
you for it afterward ; out with it, or if it be a hoax it will 
be the worse for you I” 

“But, Major,” persisted the man, halting for breath, “it 
I tell you all first, what gage have I that you will not act 
on my information, and never give me a farthing?” 

“ My word !” gasped De Vigne, hurling the answer down 
his throat. “ Do you think me such another scoundrel as 
yourself? Speak ; do you hear? Is she not my wife ?” 

“No, Major; because she was mine first!” 

“Fours? Then ” 

“Your marriage is null and void, sir.” 

De Vigne staggered against the fence, dizzy and blind 
with the delirium of his sudden liberty, the unloosing of 
those cruel fetters fastened on him by Church and Law, 
which had clung to him, festering to his very bone, and 
bowing him down with their unbearable weight. Free I 
from the curse that had so long pursued him; free from 
that hateful tie that had so long made life loathsome to 
him; free from that she-devil who so long had made him 
shun all of her sex, as men shun poisons they have once 
imbibed to the ruin of health and strength I Free, his 
name once more his own, purified from the taint of her 
claim upon it; free I — his home once more his own, purged 
from the dark and haunting memories of an irremediable 
past; free from the bitterness of his own folly, so long re 
pented of in agony and solitude; free to cast from him by 
iaw, as he had long done from heart and mind, the woman 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


411 


ivhora he loathed and hated; free to recompense with honor 
in the sight of men the strong and faithful love which 
would have given up all for his sake, and followed him 
whithersoever he should choose to lead, content if she were 
by his side to go with him to any fate. 

Dizzy and blind and breathless with the strength of the 
new-born hope, he staggered against the gray and ivy- 
tangled wall of the church, and forgetful of Raymond’s 
presence, seeing, hearing, heeding nothing, save that one 
word — free ! the blood flowing with fever-heat through all 
his veins, every nerve in his body throbbing and thrilling 
with the electric shock. 

lie covered his eyes with his hand, like a man dazzled 
with the sudden radiance of a noontide sun. Then he 
grasped Raymond’s arm again. 

“ Will you swear that ?” 

“Yes, sir, on the Bible, and before all the courts and 
judges in the land, if you like.” 

De Vigne gave one quick, deep sigh, flinging off from 
him forever the iron burden of many years. 

“Tell me all, then, quick, from beginning to end, and 
give me all your proofs.” 

He spoke with all the eager, wayward, restless impa- 
tience of his boyhood ; the old light gleamed in his eyes, 
the old music rang in his voice. The chains were struck 
off ; he was free ! 

“Very well, sir. I must go back a good many years, 
and make a long story of it. Nineteen years ago — ’tisn’t 
pleasant to look back so long, sir — Lucy Davis, the hand- 
some milliner of Frestonhills, was a very dashing-looking 
girl — as you thought. Major, at that time — and I was 
twenty- two, always weak where women were concerned, 
and much more easily taken in than I was when I had seen 
a little more of human nature. My name was Trefusis, 


418 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


sir, not Raymond at all. I took an alias when I entered 
your service. My father was a Newmarket leg, and he 
made a good pot of money one way and another; and he 
had more gentlemen in his power, and more of your peer- 
age swells, sir, under his dirty old thumb, knowing all that 
he knew, and having done for ’em all that he had done, 
than you’d believe if I was to swear it to you. He wanted 
to make a gentleman of me. ‘ Charlie, my boy,’ he used 
to say, ‘with brains and tin you may be as good as them 
swells any day ; they hain’t no sort of business to look 
down on you. I’ve done dirty work enough to serve them, 
I reckon.’ He wanted to make a gentleman of me, and he 
gave me a capital education, and more money and fine 
clothes than any boy in the school. But what’s bred in 
the bone, sir, will come out in the flesh. He went to glory 
when I was about eighteen, sir, leaving me all his tin to do 
just whatever I liked with it, and not a soul to say me nay. 
I soon spent it, sir; every stiver was gone in no time. I 
bought horses, and jewelry, and wine. I betted, I played ; 
in short, I made ducks and drakes with it in a very few 
years with a lot of idle young dogs like myself ; for though 
the money would have bought me a very good business, or 
kept me straight if I’d lived closely and quietly, it wasn’t 
enough to dash with as if I’d had a fortune at my fingers’ 
ends, like yours, sir. But I was a weak young fool in 
those days, especially w'eak about women ; a handsome 
woman might turn me round her finger just however she 
chose, and I’d no strength whatever against her. High 
and low. Major, men are all alike for the beaux yeux. 
Jimmy J arvis — you will have heard of him, sir ? — Jimmy 
was going to have a mill with the Brownlow Boy, at Gray- 
etone Green, (perhaps you remember that’s only two miles 
out of Frestonhills,) and I went down with two or three 
others to see the fight. While I was in Frestonhills, sir, 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


4ly 

\ saw Lucy Davis in the milliner’s shop in High Street, 
and I fell straight in love with her for her great black eyes 
and her bright carnation color. I thought I’d never seen 
anything half so handsome in all my days; and she was a 
magnificent girl at that time, sir — magnificent without a 
doubt. If she’d been a duchess’s daughter people would 
have made a fine row about her. I went to church to see 
her the next day, and bowed to her coming out; and so we 
got acquainted, sir, and I fell more and more in love, and 
I wouldn’t have stirred from Frestonhills just then to have 
made my fortune. That was a year after you had left, sir. 
But I knew nothing about your aflair, sir, then — trust 
her I” 

(Oh I for the woods of Yigne to hear a valet talk as 
rival to their lord. Yet in the olden times, in their hot 
youth and their inflammable passions, I dare say those 
haughty gentlemen had whispered love-vows to their 
mothers’ fair-faced handmaidens, and looked into the 
soft brown eyes of Sybil, the forest-ranger’s daughter, 
under the cool shadows of those very elms, long midsum- 
mers before ; for a young man’s taste is easily pleased, 
and, in youth, we ask no more than the bloom on the lip 
and the tint on the cheek.) 

“I was in love with her; I made myself out a gentle- 
man ; I talked grand of marble halls and gorgeous doings, 
like Claude Melnotte ; I bought her presents fit for a count- 
ess ; I set all my wits lo work to win her, and she was a 
very hard-mouthed, touchy young filly at that time, sir, 
with a very careful eye to her own interests, and very 
sure not to do anything till she thought it was for her 
own advantage. At seventeen, sir, Lucy was a shrewd, 
calculating hard-hearted woman of the world, an intri- 
gante tc do young fellows by the dozen. Half the women 
that go to the bad, sir, do it because bad is their bias — 


420 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


because they like vice better than virtue, find it more lucra- 
tive, and it pleases their vanity or their avarice. Love has 
very little to do with it, sir; there are bad women as well 
as bad men, I take it, though the papers and the preachers 
do terra them all innocent angels ! Well I I was in love 
with Lucy, and she thought me a man of fashion and of 
fortune, and married me; the register is in the church of 
Frestonhills ; you can see it, sir, any day you like. In six 
flonths I thought myself a very great fool for having fet- 
tered myself — most people think so, sir, some time or other, 
poor folks even more than rich. Lucy’s temper was that 
of a devil — always had been — and when she found out that 
all my riches would very soon make themselves wings and 
flee away, -you may suppose it was not softened very much. 
She helped me to spend my money, sir, for twelve months, 
leading me about as wretched a life as any woman could 
lead a man. We lived chiefly abroad, sir, in Paris, and at 
*,he German Baths; then the tin was all gone, and Lucy 
grew a very virago, and, as she had taken me only out of 
ambition, it was a hard cut to her, I dare say, to find me a 
mere nobody, with nothing at all to speak of in the way of 
money, much less of rank. She led me a shocking life, sir. 
We parted by mutual consent; we could not get on at all, 
and we hated each other cordially. I left her at Wies- 
baden, and went my own ways; she had spent every shil- 
ling I had. Some time after, I was fool enough to forge a 
check; it was found out, and they shipped me off to tho 
colonies, and Lucy was free of me. Some years after, I 
learnt what she did with herself ; at Wiesbaden old Lady 
Fantyre was staying, rouging, gambling, and living by her 
wits, as you know she always has done, sir, ever since any- 
body can remember her. She saw Lucy at the Kursaal, 
and Luey had improved wonderfully in twelve months ; she 
could get up a smattering of things very fast; she could 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNK. 


421 


dress well on little or nothing; she had quick wits, and a 
haughty, defiant, knock-me-down manner that concealed 
all her ignorance, and carried everything before her. Old 
Fantyre took a fancy to her ; she wanted to have a com 
panion, somebody to make her up well for the evenings,, 
and read her dirty novels to her, and humor her caprices, 
and amuse the young fellows at her little card-parties while 
she fleeced them at ecarte or vingt-et-un. Lucy seemed just 
fit for her place. She didn’t know she was married ; Lucy 
made herself out an innocent, unprotected girl, whom you, 
sir, had deserted in an abominable way, and old Fantyre 
took her into her service. She thought Lucy’s handsome 
black eyes would draw plenty of greenhorns to her supper- 
table and her cards, and you know, sir, the cards have 
always been the old lady’s bankers, and very good ones, 
too, or I mistake. Now, Lucy was an uncommonly clever 
girl, hard-hearted and sharp-sighted ; she humored the old 
woman, she made herself necessary to her, she chimed in 
with all her sayings, she listened to all her stories, she got 
into her good graces, and made her do pretty well what 
she chose. You remember, sir, perhaps, that when you and 
Lucy parted at Frestonhills she told you she’d be revenged 
on you. She isn’t a woman to forget; if a cat scratched 
her, and she met that cat again ten years afterward, she’d 
recognize it, and punish it. She’d kept you steadily in her 
mind, and meant to pay you off for it one fine day, when- 
ever occasion served. She’d set her heart on punishing 
you the bitterest way she could, and thought, and planned, 
and schemed till she’d got it all complete. She told Lady 
Fantyre about you, and she induced her to think that if 
she could catch you and marry you, what a capital thing 
it would be for both of them, and how royally they could 
help you to spend your fortune. 

I must tell you, Lucy had heard that the government 
36 3e 


VOL. II. 


422 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


sliip that had Uken me out to Botany Bay had foundered, 
and she didn’t know that I and a few others had managed 
to drift in the jolly-boat till an American cruiser picked us 
up. She thought I was drowned, or else she would have 
been a vast lot too wide awake to go in for bigamy. Old 
Fantyre listened, agreed, and took her to England, and 
introduced her as her niece. There, as you know, sir, you 
met her, and fell into her toils again. I don’t wonder you 
did not know her; I never should. Years and society and 
dress, and the education she’d given herself, mad^' such a 
difference. And how should you think of Lady Fantyre’s 
niece being the same with the milliner girl of Frestonhills 
High Street? And she was far handsomer then than she 
had been at sixteen. She caught you, sir — you know how 
better than I ; and at the church her devilish nature came 
out, and she took the worst revenge she could on you, by 
proclaiming who she was before all your friends. She knew 
if you’d only found it out afterward, you’d have hidden it 
in your own heart; the world would have been none the 
wiser, and she’d have been cheated of half her revenge. 
Four years after you had married her, I cara» to Europe. 
I’d been staying in the United States, till I thought all 
fear of my being recognized for that by-gone little affair 
had blown over; and I went as valet to the Due de Ver- 
muth. I often wondered what had become of my wife; 
till one Sunday, when I went to the Pre Catalan, I saw a 
lady in a carriage, talking and laughing with a number of 
young fellows round her. She was a remarkably fine-look- 
ing woman, and something in her face struck me as like my 
wife. At that minute she saw me. She turned as white 
Rs her rouge would let her, gave a sort of scream, and 
stared at me. Perhaps she thought she saw my ghost 
At any rate, she ])ulled the check-string, and drove away 
from me as fast as she could, whetlusr I was in the spirit or 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


423 


the flesh. Of course I didn’t let her give me the slip like 
that. I followed her to a dashing hotel in the Champs 
Elysees, and just as she stepped on the pave, after her 
grand green and gold chasseur, I stepped up to her and 
just said, ‘Well, old girl, how are you?’ Horrible she 
looked — as if she longed to kill me — and, indeed, T dare 
say she did. She signed me to silence, and said, ‘Not 
now; come at eight this evening.’ I went; and she told 
me all her story, and offered me, if 1 would keep quiet and 
tell nobody she was my wife, to go shares with me in the 
money you allowed her provided she lived" out of England. 
I thought about it a little. I saw I should get nothing by 
proclaiming our marriage. I closed with her, and I lived 
at my ease. But she grew screwy ; she didn’t pay up to 
time. She used to anticipate the money, and then defraud 
me of my share. At last it came into my head, when 1 
heard you had come back from India, to see what sort of 
gentleman you were, and whether you wanted your freedom 
bad enough to pay me a high price for it. You required a 
valet. I entered your service ; and when I was sent down 
to Richmond with the parrot and the books and the flowers, 
and so on, for that little lady — no. Major, don’t stop me, 
I mean no offense to her, and I must bring her name in to 
make my story clear — I thought the time would soon come, 
sir, when you’d give any price for your freedom, for I. 
heard plenty of talk, sir, at that time, about you and her; 
servants trouble themselves more about their master’s busi- 
ness than they do about their own. The day you dismissed 
me from your service, I was going to tell you, if you had 
only listened. But you were so impatient and so haughty, 
that 1 thought I’d let you go on in ignorance, and free 
vourself, if ever you wanted, as best you might. I entered 
Lord Yanc Castleton’s service then. You know he hated 
you bitterly, because he was gone quite mad about Misa 


424 


GRANVILLE DE VIQNE. 


Tressillian ; had set his heart upon her, just because he 
thought she belonged to you and was not to be had. It 
seems, sir, he had been very good friends with Lucy in 
Paris, and he wrote and told her you were in love again, 
and with somebody who, he thought, didn’t know you were 
married, and that if she wished to put a stop to it, she 
should come over and tell Miss Alma. Over she did come, 
saw him first, and then went to St. Crucis ; and after she’d 
been — I didn’t see her, and didn’t know she was in London 
— he sent me to bring Miss Tressillian to Windsor, while 
you were sitting in court-martial on Mr. Halkett. It was 
a dirty job, sir, I know, and a rascally one. Don’t look 
at me so fiercely, Major, for God’s sake. I am sorry I did 
it now, for she’d sweet blue eyes, that little lady, and I was 
never quite easy till I knew she’d got out of Lord Vane’s 
clutches; she must have done it by some miracle, for no 
ether woman ever got away from him before. Then you 
went to the Crimea, and Lucy paid worse and worse ; to 
be sure, she gave me that diamond ceinture she wore on 
her wedding-day, your present to her, sir, I think, and it 
was good for lOOOZ., but they wouldn’t give me so much 
at the Mont de Piete, and I owed more than half what 
they did give me. At last I thought I v/ould try you again, 
if only to spite Lucy, who was living in splendor and 
grudging me every shilling. I wrote to you at the Crimea 
— I called to speak to you at Mivart’s — finally, I tracked 
you here. Now I’ve told you all my tale. Major. I know 
you well enough to know your word is as sure a bond as 
another man’s check; and if you’ll go with me, sir, to 
Trinity Church, Frestonhills, I’ll show you the register of 
my marriage, sir, which makes yours null and void.” 

De Vigue leant against the old gray stone ; his face was 
white with the intensity of the sudden joy, his breathing 
;jame short and thick, his eyes were dark as night, with the 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


425 


.apture thrilling through every nerve, till it seemed to 
stifle him in its intensity ; his strong frame trembled like a 
woman’s. The ecstasy of that hour I No criminal, con- 
demned to death and suddenly reprieved, felt the warm 
rush of fresh air welcoming him as he issued — a free man— 
from the darkness of his prison-cell of doom, with deeper, 
more bewildering joy, than he realized and welcomed his 
liberty from the festering and bitter chains that so long had 
dragged upon him — his liberty from the weary weight, the 
repented folly, the bitter curse of an Early Marriage. 

He was silent, breathing fast and loud, struggling to 
realize this possibility of freedom. Then — he threw back 
his head with a proud joyous gesture; he looked up to the 
glad summer sun shining above his head ; he drew in with 
a deep long breath the free sweet air that streamed around 
him. He turned his eyes upon the man, flashing with their 
old, proud, brilliant, shadowless light. 

“Right I I would pay any price for freedom. Let us 
go at once. I will not lose an hour — a moment I” 

He went — and the sunlight played over his mother’s 
grave, seeming to linger fondly there, touching the fra- 
grant violets to a deeper blue and the lilies to a purer 
silver. It was pitiful that the gentle and loving heart, 
stilled there forever, could not awake to throb in unison 
with her sou’s joy, and know his freedom from that deadly 
curse whose blow had sent her to her tomb ! Her love had 
been with him in his grief ; it was cruel that her love could 
not be with him in his joy. Cruel? ah, truly I — on earth 
there is no more bitter thing than the death that is in the 
midst of life. 

Erestonhills, unchanged, lay nestling among the green 
pastures and fresh woods of Berkshire, and all the old 
familiar places struck strangely on him as he passed them. 

3G* 


426 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


There flowed the silver Kennet, bright and rapid as of old, 
rushing on its swift sunny way under the graceful bridges, 
and past the wild luxuriant hedges, and through the quiet, 
silent country towns and villages. There, on its banks, 
were schoolboys lying among the purple clover and under 
the fragrant hawthorns, as poor little Curly had done long 
years ago. There were the dark palings, and the great 
forest-trees of the park of Weivehurst, long changed to 
other hands before its rightful owner was laid to rest, his 
grave marked only by a simple wooden cross, under the 
southern skies of Lorave. There, against the blue hea»ens, 
rose above its woods the gray pinnacles of the old nouse 
where Alma Tressillian had made the roof ring with her 
childish laughter, playing On the dark galleries, or out 
under the golden laburnums that flung the same shadows 
on the lawn, now, as then. There was the old Chancery, 
its gable roofs and its low ivy-grown walls, as he passed. 
A lady glanced up, gardening among her geraniums and 
heliotropes — it was Miss Arabella — the ringlets very gray 
now. A little farther on, in the old playing-field, there 
were the wickets, and the bats, and the jumping poles, 
and four or five boys, in their shirt sleeves and their straw 
hats, enjoying their half-holiday, as we had done before 
them. So life goes on ; when one is bowled out, another 
is ready to step into his shoes, and, no matter how many 
the ball of death may knock over, the cricket of life is 
kept up the same, and players are never wanting. 

The register lay on the table under the arched Norman 
window of the vestry of the church where, twenty years 
before, we had fidgeted through the dreary periods of 
the rector’s cruel sermon full an hour long, and cast 
glances over our hymn-books at the pastrycook’s pretty 
daughters. 

The great old register, ponderous and dusty, lay on *he 


GRANVILLE DE V^IGNE. 


427 


table, the sunbeams from the stained glass above falling 
on its leather binding, and its thickly- written leaves, full 
of so many records of man’s joy and sorrow, crowded with 
so many names that now were empty sounds, penned by 
so many hands that were now crumbled to dust under the 
churchyard sods near by. The great register lay on its 
table ill the dark, quiet, solitary vestry — the last he had 
seen was the one in which he had signed his doom, eleven 
years before, in tlie church at Vigne. The old sexton un- 
locked the book, and with shaking infirm hand turned over 
the leaves one after the other. De Vigne leant against the 
table, watching for the entry, his breath short and labored, 
his pulse beating with fever-heat, a mist before his eyes, a 
great agony of dread — the dread of deception — tightening 
his heart and oppressing him to suffocation. If the man’s 
story were not true ! — if this, too, were a hoax and a fraud I 
Breathless, trembling in every limb with fear and hope, he 
bent over the book, pushing the old man’s hand away; his 
agony of impatience could not brook the slow and awk- 
ward fumbling of leaf after leaf — by the palsied feebleness 
of age. He thrust the pages back one after another till 
he reached the year 18 — . Entry after entry met his eye : 
from lords of the manor, their ancestral names dashed 
across the page; from poor peasants, who could only 
make their mark ; from feminine signatures, trembling and 
illegible, marriage after marriage met his eager glance, 
but not yet the one which was to loosen his fetters and 
set him free. He turned the leaves over one after the 
other, his heart throbbing thick with wild hope and irre- 
pressible fear. At last the setting sun, shining in through 
the rich hues of glory, the rubies and the ambers, the heads 
of saints, and the golden scrolls, and the blazoned shields 
on the stained window above his head, flung radiant colors 
on one dim yellow sheet, illumining with its aureole of ligh» 


428 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


tbe two signatures he sought — the words that ga^e him 
ransom — the names that struck ofl’ his chains — 

Charles Treeusis. 

Constance Lucy Davis. 

j^nd as his eyes fell upon the page that freed him from the 
wife that had so long cursed his life, and stained his honor, 
and made his name abhorrent in his sight, because she bore 
it, De Vigne staggered forward, and, flinging the casement 
open, leant out into the calm, fresh evening, stunned by his 
sudden deliverance as by some mortal blow, and gasping 
for breath, while the warm westerly wind swept over him, 
like a man who has escaped from the lurid heat and 
stifling agony of fire into the pure, sweet air of a breaking 
dawn. 

He was Free I The life that he had so madly sought 
to spend like water, and fling off from him as an evil too 
bitter to be borne, among jungles of Scinde and on the 
steppes of the Crimea, was once more rich, and precious, 
and beloved ; — he learned at last what his wayward nature 
had been long ere it would believe, that the fate we deem 
a curse is oftentimes an angel in disguise, if we wait pa- 
tiently for the unfolding of its wings from the darkneM 
that enshrouds them. 


< 


GRANVILLE DE VTQNE. 


420 


PART THE TWENTY-NINTH. 

I. 

VALETE. 

Two days after there was a fete given at Enghein, at 
the princely maison de plaisance of an English earl — a 
stout, bloated old man, lavish as the wind, and rich as a 
Russian, who, consequently, had all the. most seductive 
Parisiennes to make love to him; Dalilah caring very 
little who her Samson be, provided she can cut olf his 
locks to her own advantage. The fete was of unusual 
magnificence, and the empress of it was “the Trefusis,^’ as 
we call her, “that poor fellow De Yigne’s wife — a very 
fast lot, too,” as men in general called her — “ Ma Reine,” 
as the Earl of Morehampton called her, in that pleasant 
familiarity which the lady in question ever readily ad- 
mitted to those good friends of hers, who emptied half the 
Palais Royal upon her in bijouterie, jewelry, and other 
innocent gifts of amity — a familiarity that always stopped 
just short of Sir CresswelFs court, over the water. The 
Trefusis reigned at Enghein, and remarkably well she looked 
in her sovereignty, her jeweled ivory parasol handle for 
her scepter, and her handsome eyes for her droit de coc- 
quete. Only three nights before she had lain on the dank 
grass in the Royal Forest, where the mad agony of a man, 
whom she had goaded and taunted to the verge of the 
darkest and most hideous guilt that can stain a human 
soul, had flung her off, bidding her thank God, not him, 
he had not murdered her in that ghastly temptation; hurl- 
ing ner from mm in delirious violence, lest in another 


430 


GRANVILLE DE VTGNE. 


moment of that fell struggle crime should stain his life, 
and his grip should be upon her throat — her death lie at 
his door — her blood be red upon his hand ! Only three 
nights before ! but to-day she sat under the limes at 
Knghein, the very memory of that hour cast behind her 
for evermore, save when she remembered how she had 
taunted, how she had jeered, how she had triumphed — 
remembered in gloating glee, for her victim could not 
escape her snare I The Trefusis had rarely looked better 
. — never felt more secure in her completed vengeance upon 
De Yigne, her omnipotent sway over Morehampton, and 
all her lordly claque, than now. She was beautifully 
rouged, the carnation tint rich and soft, and defying all 
detection; her black Chantilly lace swept around her 
superb form; a parure of amethysts glittering in her 
bosom, haughtily defiant, magnificent, though coarse if 
you will, as she drove down to the villa in the Earl’s car- 
riage, and reigned under the limes in dominance and 
triumph that day, as she had reigned since the day she 
had first looked at her own face in the mirror, and sworn 
by that face to rise and to revenge. 

In brilliant style Morehampton had prepared to receive 
her, for he admired the quasi-milliner of Frestonhills more 
than anything else, for the time being, to the extreme rage 
of La Baronne de Breloques, Mademoiselle Celeste Papil- 
lon of the Fran9ais, and many other fair Parisiennes. 
There was the villa itself, luxurious as Eugene Sue’s ; and 
there were grounds with alcoves, and statues, and rosieries 
ii ravir, as Mademoiselle Celeste phrased it; there was a 
“pavilion des arts,” where some of the best cantatrici in 
Paris sang like nightingales ; there was a dejeuner, with 
the best cookery in France — who can say more? there 
were wines that would have made Rahab or Father 
Mathew swear, with Trimalchio, “Vita vinuni est;” there 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


431 


were plenty of men, lions, litterateurs, and milors Anglais 
who were not bored here, because they could say and do 
just what they pleased, with no restraint upon them what- 
ever. And there were plenty of women, (very handsome 
ones, too, for the Earl would never have wasted his invita- 
tions on plain faces,) who smoked, and laughed at grivoises 
tales, and smiled at very prononcee flattery, and drank the 
Johannisberg and the Steinberg very freely for such dainty 
lips, and imitated us with their tranchant manners, their 
slang, and their ^lionneism in many tilings, except their 
toilettes, which were exclusively feminine in their brilliance 
and voluminous extent — among them the Trefusis, reign- 
ing like an empress, to the dire annoyance of most of 
them, especially to Mademoiselle Papillon, who, being a 
very dashing young actress, accustomed to look upon 
Morehampton as her own especial spoil, did not relish 
being eclipsed by the Englishwoman’s superb person and 
bold black eyes. 

The dejeiiner was over, during which the noble Earl, as 
his friends in the Upper House termed him when they 
were most politely damning him and his party, was ex- 
ceedingly devoue to the Trefusis, and thought he had 
never seen anything finer than those admirably-tinted eyes 
and beautifully-colored cheeks. He did not care for your 
nymphs of eighteen, they were generally too shy and too 
thin for his taste ; he liked bien conserve, full-blown, mag- 
nificent roses, like the ex-milliner, who certainly made her- 
self more amiable to him than those who have only heard 
of her in the studio at St. Crucis and the Forest of Fon- 
tainebleau can well imagine. The dejeuner was ovei, at 
which the Trefusis had reigned with supreme contentment, 
laughed very loudly, and drank champagne enough for a 
young cornet just joined ; at which old Fantyre enjoyed 
the pdtes de foie gras and other deboftcift* like an old 


432 


GRANVILLE BE VIGNE. 


gourmette as she was, told dirty stories in broad Irish* 
French, and chuckled in herself to see gouty old More- 
hampton playing the gallant; and at which Mademoiselle 
Papillon could have fainted with spite, but not willing to 
give the detested Englishwoman so enormous a triumph, 
resisted her feelings with noble heroism. 

The dejeuner was over, and the guests had broken up 
into groups, dispersing themselves over the villa and its 
grounds. The Trefusis and Morehampton took them- 
selves to the “pavilion des arts;” but, after hearing one 
song from the “Traviata,” “ Ma Reine” was bored — she 
cared nothing for music — and she threw herself down on a 
seat under some linden-trees to take ice, listen to his pri- 
vate band, which was playing close by, and flatter him 
about his new barouche, which she knew would be offered 
her as soon as she had praised it. It was by such gifts as 
these she managed to eke out her income, and live au 
premier in the Champs Elysees. Morehampton flung him- 
self on the grass at her feet, forgetful of gout and lum- 
bago; other men gathered round her; she was a “deuced 
fine woman,” they thought, but, “by George! they didn’t 
envy De Vigne.” The band played valses and Beranger 
airs; the Earl was diverted between admiration of the 
black eyes above and rueful recollections of the damp turf 
beneath him ; Mademoiselle Papillon made desperate love 
to Leslie Egerton, of the Queen’s Bays, but never missed a 
word or a glance that went on under the lime-trees for 
all that, with that peculiar double set of optics and oral 
nerves with which women seem gifted. Yery brilliant, and 
pleasant, and lively, and Watteau-like it all was; and, 
standing under an alcove at some little distance, mingling 
unnoticed with the crowd of domestics, stood Raymond, 
alias Charles Trefusis, come to claim his wife, as he had 
been bound by De Yigne to do on receipt of De Yigne’a 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


433 


reward — none the less weighty a one, you may be sure, 
because the man had been given only a promise, and not 
a bond. De Yigne’s honor in those matters was in exact 
inverse ratio to the world’s. 

“By Jove I sir,” the fellow whispered to me — I had come 
with him to see he kept good faith, and did not give us the 
slip — “just look at her, what a dash she cuts, and what a 
fool she’s making of that old lord ! That’s Lord More- 
hampton, ain’t it, sir? I think I remember him dining 
once with Lord Yane in Pall Mall. He’s a regular mar- 
tyr to the gout. I wonder he likes that damp grass. I 
suppose Lucy’s bewitched him. Isn’t she a wonderful 
woman, sir ! Who’d think, to see her now, that she was 
ever the daughter of a beggar-woman, and a little milliner- 
girl at Frestonhills, making bonnets and dresses for par- 
sons’ wives !” 

I looked at her as he spoke, and, though it seemed won- 
derful to him, it did not seem wonderful to me. Lucy 
Davis’s rise was such a rise as Lucy Davis was certain to 
make, ‘ favored by opportunity as she had been — neither 
more nor less of a rise than a hard-headed, unscrupulous, 
excessively handsome woman, determined to push her way, 
and able to take the best possible advantage of every turn 
of the wheel, was pretty sure to effect. She could not 
make herself a gentlewoman — she could not make herself 
a woman of talent or of ton. That she was not a “lady,” 
Sabretasche’s sure perception had told him long, long ago, 
and his daughter’s delicate taste had known still more fitsr- 
tainly later on ; she was merely what she had been for the 
last ten years, with the aid of money, dress, and assurance 
— a dashing, handsome, skillful intrigante, whose magnifi- 
cence of form made men forget or never notice her short- 
comings in style, and whose full-blown beauty made them 
content with the paucity of ideas and the vulgar harshness 
VOL. u. 87 


484 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


of tone in the few words which ever passed the Trefusis's 
Hps, which were too wise to essay often that sure touch- 
stone of mind and education — conversation. 

Raymond stood looking at her, a cunning, malicious 
gleam of satisfaction in his little light eyes. His wife had 
made a better thing of life than he had done ; he detested 
her accordingly; he had many old grudges to pay off 
against her for bitter, snarling words, and money flung to 
him, because she feared him, with a sneer and an invective; 
he hated her for having lived in clover, while he had not 
even had a taste of luxury, save the luxuries of flunkeyisra 
and valetdom, since they parted, and he enjoyed pulling 
her up in the midst of her glories with such malignant 
pleasure as was natural to his disposition. She had mar- 
ried him at two-and- twenty ; she had made him repent of 
it before the honeymoon was out; she had played her cards 
since to her own glorification and his mortification: there 
was plenty in all that to give him no little enjoyment in 
throwing her back, with a jerk, in the midst of her race. 
He stood looking at her with a peculiar smile on his lips. 
I dare say he was thinking what a fool he had been to fall 
in love with the black-eyed milliner of Frestonhills, and 
what a far greater fool still was his lordship of Morehamp- 
ton to waste so much time and so much money, such wines, 
such jewelry, and such adoration, on this full-blown rose, 
whom no one ever tried to gather but, somewhere or 
other, they scratched themselves on her dextrously moss- 
nidden thorns. 

At last the Trefusis, tired of ices, cancans, and More- 
hampton’s florid compliments, which I should think must 
have been most profoundly tiresome, (though all flattery 
is welcome to some women, as all bonbons to children, 
whether of sugar or chalky lemon-juice or citric acid,) rose 
to go into the house and look at some rare Du Bcrri vases 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


435 


that had belonged to Madame de Parabere, and for which 
the Earl had given a fabulous price, and as foolish a one 
as our ancestors used to give for tulip-roots. The Trefusia 
rose, Morehampton sprung to his feet with boyish light- 
ness and gallant disregard of the gout, and then her hus- 
band stepped forward ; and 1 doubt if Nemesis, though 
she often took a more imposing, ever assumed a deadlier 
guise than that of the ci-devant valet ! 

The Trefusis gave an irrepressible start as she saw him; 
the color left her lips — her cheeks it could not leave. She 
began laughing and talking to Morehampton hurriedly, 
nervously, incoherently, but there was a wild, lurid gleam 
in her eye, restless and savage. Her husband touched his 
hat submissively, but with a queer smile still on his face. 

“ I beg your pardon, my lord, but may I be allowed to 
relieve you of the escort of my wife 

Morehampton twisted himself round, stuck his gold glass 
in his eye, and stared with all his might; the men crowded 
closer, stroking their moustaches in curiosity and surprise ; 
the English women, who could understand the speech, sus- 
pended the spoonfuls of ice that were en route to their 
lips, and broke off their conversation for a minute; the 
Trefusis flushed scarlet to her very brow, her eyes scintil- 
lated and glared like a tigress just stung by a shot that 
inflames all her savage nature into fury — ,ever ready with a 
lie, she clung to MorehamptoiPs arm: 

“ My dear lord 1 I know this poor creature very well ; he 
is a lunatic — a confirmed lunatic — a harmless one quite; 
but it is one of his hallucinations that every woman he sees 
and admires is his wife, w^ho really, I believe, ran away 
from him, and his brain was turned with the shock of her 
infidelity. He is harmless, as I say — at least I have always 
heard so — but pray tell your servants to take him away. 
U is very horrible 


436 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


It wsis an admirably-told falsehood — told, too, with the 
most natural ease, the most natural compassion imagina- 
ble — and passed muster with Morehampton, who signed to 
two of his lacqueys. 

“Seize that fellow and turn him out of the grounds. 
IIow did he get in, Soames? Go for some gendarmes if 
ne resist you,” said the Earl, aloud; then bent his head, 
and added, (sotto voce,) “How grieved I am, dearest, that 
you should be so absurdly annoyed. What a shockingly 
stupid fellow I Brain turned, you say — and for a wife ?” 

But Raymond signed off the two footmen, who were 
circling gingerly round him like two dogs round a hedge- 
hog, not admiring their task, having a genuine horror of 
lunacy, and being enervated, probably, by the epicurean- 
isms of plush-existence. 

“ That is a pretty story, my lord, only, unfortunately, it 
isn’t true. Ben travato — but all a humbug I I am as sane 
as anybody here ; much too sane to have my brain turned 
because my wife ran away from me. Most men would 
thank their stars for such a kind deliverance I I am come 
to claim mine, though, for a little business there is to be 
done, and she is on your arm now, my lord. She married 
me nineteen years ago, and made me repent of it before a 
month was out.” 

“Dear, dear ! how absurd, and yet how shocking I Pray 
send him away,” whispered the Trefusis, clinging to the 
Earl’s arm, looking, it must be confessed, more like a 
devil than a divinity, for her lips were white and twitch- 
ing savagely, and the spots of rouge glared scarlet. 

“ Do you hear me, fellows? Turn that impudent rascal 
out!” swore Morehampton. 

“That fellow’s wife! Why, she’s De Yigne’s wife. 
Everybody knows that I” muttered Leslie Egerton, stick- 
ing his glass in his eye. “ Saw him married myself, poor 
wretch I” 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


43T 


■*Mais qu’est ce que c’est done?” asked Mademoiselle 
Papillon, edging herself in with a dim delicious idea that 
it was something detrimental to her rival. 

‘‘Kick him outl” “Turn him outl” “An escaped luna- 
tic 1” “ Impertinent rascal !” “ Ma foi ! qu’a t-il done !” 

“Mais comrae c’est extraordinaire!” “Dieu! qu’est ce 
que cela veut dire !” resounded on all sides from More- 
haraptoti’s guests, and the Trefusis’s adorers. 

“Major De Yigne’s wife?” repeated Raymond. “No, 
she’s not, gentlemen ; he knows it now, too, and thanks 
Heaven foi it. She married me, as I say, nineteen years 
ago ; more fool I to let her. Ten years ago she married 
Major De Vigne. So you see, my lord, she’s my wife, 
not his, and I believe what she has done is given a nasty, 
coarse, impolite terra by law. What I tell you is quite 
true. Here’s Captain Chevasney, my lord, who will tell 
you the same, and tell it better than I. Come, old girl, 
you’ve had a long holiday; you must come with me and 
work for a little while now.” 

He spoke with a diabolical grin, and, thus appealed to, 
I went forward and gave Moreharapton as succinctly b.s I 
«ould the outlines of the story. The Trefusis’s face grew 
gray as ashes, save where the rouge remained in two bright 
crimson spots fixed and unchanged, her eyes glittered in 
tiger-like fury, in cold, hellish wrath, and her parasol fell 
to the ground ; its ivory handle snapped in two as her 
hands clinched upon it, only with a violent effort restrain- 
ing herself from flying at mine or her husband’s throat. 
For the first time in her life, the clever Greek had her own 
marked card turned against her; her schemes of malice, of 
vengeance, of ambition, were all swept away like cobwebs, 
never to be gathered up again. De Yigne was free, and 
she was caught in her own toils ! 

She swung round, sweeping her black Chantilly lace 
37* Zf 


'438 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


rcuDd her, and scattering her sandal- wjod perfume 
the air, laughing : 

“And do you believe this cock-and-bull story, Lord 
Morehampton ?” Her voice came out in a low, fierce 
hiss, like a serpent’s, while her large, sensual, ruby lips 
rurled and quivered with impotent rage. “Do you believe 
this valet’s tale, bribed by a man who would move heaven 
and earth to prove his lawful marriage false, and the cor- 
roborating story told so glibly by a gentleman who, though 
he calls himself a man of honor, would swear black were 
white to pleasure his friend ?” 

“Come, come there, my lady!” laughed Raymond. 
“Wait a bit. Don’t call us bad names. You can’t ride 
the high horse any more like that, and if you don’t take 
care what you say we’ll have you up for libel ; we will, I 
assure you. Come, you used to be wide awake once, and 
if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your head it may be the 
worse for you.” 

“Lord Morehampton, will you endure this? I must 
appeal,” began the Trefusis, turning again to that noble 
Earl, who, with his double eye-glass in his eye, and his 
under lip dropped in extreme astonishment, was too much 
amazed, and too much annoyed, at such an unseemly and 
untimely interruption to his morning fete to take any part 
in the proceedings whatever. He was a little shy of her, 
indeed, and kept edging back slowly and surely. She was 
trembling now from head to foot with rage at her defeat, 
terror for the consequences of the esclandrc, mad wrath 
and hatred that her victim had slipped from her fetters 
and that De Yigne was free. 

Her husband interrupted her with a coarse laugh, befor’ 
she could finish. 

“You appeal to your cavalier servente, madame ? Oh I 

my Lord Morehampton likes to keep you, / have no ob* 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


43 & 


jection ; it will take a good deal of trouble off my hands, 
and I only wish him joy of his bargain. And next time, 
Lucy, make sure your chickens are hatched before you 
count them I” 

At so summary a proposition from a husband, the Earl 
involuntarily drew back, blank dismay visible on his purple 
find supine features. The offer alarmed him ! The Trefusis 
was a deuced handsome woman, but she was a deuced ex- 
pensive one too, thought he, and he hardly desired to be 
saddled with her pour toujours. Added to his other ex- 
penses, for a permanence, she would go very near to ruin 
him, not to mention tears, reproaches, and scenes from 
many other quarters; and “she is a very vixen of a 
temper!’’ reflected the earl, wisely, as he edged a little 
farther back, and left her standing alone — who is not 
alone in defeat? 

The Trefusis looked round on everybody as they hung 
back from her, leaving a clear space about her, with a 
searching, defiant glance, her fierce, black eyes seeming 
to smite and wither all they lit on; great ^savage lines 
gathered round her mouth and down her brow, that was 
dark with mortification and impotent chained-up fury. 
She glanced around, her lips twitching like a snared ani- 
mal’s, her face ashy gray save where the crimson rougf 
burned in two oval patches, flaring there like streaks : 
flame, in hideous contrast to the deathly pallor of the 
rest. She was defeated, outdone, humiliated; the frauds 
and schemes of twenty years fruitless and unavailing in 
the end; her victim free, her enemies triumphant! She 
glared upon us all till the boldest women shrank away 
terrified, and the men shuddered as they thought what a 
fiend incarnate this their “belle femme” was! Then she 
gathered her rich lace around her. To do her justice, she 
was game to the last I 


‘440 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


“Order my carriage!’’ 

She was beaten, but she would not show it; and to her 
carriage she swept, her massive Chantilly gathered round 
her, her silks rustling, her perfume scenting the air, her 
demie traine brushing the lime-blossoms off the lawn, her 
step stately and measured, her head defiantly erect, leav- 
ing on the grass behind her the fragile ivory handle, sym- 
bol of her foiled vengeance and her impotent wrath — her 
dethroned sovereignty. There was a moment’s silence as 
she swept across the lawn, her tall chasseur, in his dash- 
ing green and gold uniform, walking before her, her two 
footmen with their long white wands behind, and at her 
side, dogging her footsteps, with his sneer of retribution 
and his smile of vengeance, the valet who had claimed 
her as his wife. There was a moment’s silence ; then the 
tongues were loosened, and her friends, and her rivals, and 
her adorers spake. 

“Gad!” quoth my Lord of Morehampton, “she looked 
quite ugly, ’pon my soul she did, with those great rouge 
spots on her cheeks. Curse it! how deuced shocking!” 

' “Mon Dieu, milor,” sneered Mademoiselle Papillon, 
“]e vous felicete sur votre nouvelle amie, peut-etre vous 
voudriez avoir le plaiser de prendre la role du troisieme 
mari !” 

“Better go and be Queen of the Greeks — deuced sha^'p 
woman !” said Lee Philipps. 

“Always said that creature was the very devil. Plucky 
enough, though I” remarked Leslie Egerton, with his cig- 
arette in his teeth. “What a jolly thing for De Yigne I 
Prime, ain’t it ?” 

“The biter bit!” chuckled old Fantyre. “Well she was 
very useful to me, but she was always a devil, as you say, 
licslie; horrid temper! She should have managed her 
game better. I’ve no patience with people who don’t 


GRANVILLE DE VIUNE; 


441 


make sure of their cards. Dear, dear I who’ll read me to 
sleep of a night ?” 

And the others all crowded round me, dirty old Fantyre 
peering closest of all, with her little, bright, cunning, in- 
quisitive eyes. 

“Come, tell us, Chevasney, is it true 

“I say, old fellow, what’s the row ?” 

So the world talks of us, either in our sorrows or our 
sins ! They were full of curiosity, annoyance, amusement — 
as it happened to affect them individually; none of them 
stopped to regret the great lie, to remember the great 
wrong,. to grieve for the debased human nature, and the 
bitter satire on the Holy Bond of Marriage, that stood 
out ill such black letters in the new story which I added to 
their repertoire of scandales. Cancans amuse us; we 
never stop to recollect the guilt, the sorrow, or the lie that 
must give them their foundation-stone, their coloring, and 
their flavor. Mademoiselle Papillon was nearest of all to 
the moral of the story, when she shrugged her little plump 
shoulders : 

“Mon Dieu ! Qui voudrait se marierl Dans celle ' 
loterie bizarre qui pent esperer d’eviter la chicane? En 
amour on est un auge — en mariage un demon. Nul homme 
sage ne I’essayeraitI” 

jK jK ♦ :|« j 

The summer sunshine that lit up the sparkling wines,, 
and glittering toilettes, and gorgeous liveries of the fete at 
Enghein, shining on the Trefusis’s parure of amethysts 
and on the rich scarlet rouge of her cheeks — that flag of 
defiance that flaunted there in defeat as in victory I — shone 
at the same hour through the dark luxuriant foliage of 
the chestnuts at St. Crucis, on the lilac-boughs heavy with 
massed blossom, on the half-opened rosebuds clinging round 
the woo lwork of the old brown walls and on the swallow’s 


442 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


uest nestled under the thatch of the eaves. A warm amber 
light, the light of the coming summer, lay on the earthy 
and in it the gnats were whirling at their play, and the 
early butterflies fluttering their saffron wings. The after- 
noon was perfectly still, no sound breaking in upon its 
silence except now and then the song of a bird in the 
branches, the lazy drone of a bee among the lilacs, or the 
distant chime of a church clock afar off ringing the quar- 
ters slowly and softly in the summer air. And out on the 
dark oaken sill of the window, drooping her head upon 
her hands, while the light flickered down upon her hair 
through the network of the leaves, leant a woman, heed- 
less, in the depth of her own thought, of the play of the 
south wind or the songs of the birds, as both made music 
about her among the chestnut-blossoms and the lilac-leaves 
without. Alma had been but a few hours in England, and 
had come at once to her old home, endeared to her by a 
thousand associations. She was alone, nothing near her 
save the bee droning in the cup of the early rose, or the 
yellow butterfly that settled on her hair unnoticed. Her 
head was bent, resting on her hand ; her face was very pale, 
save when now and then a deep warm flush passed over it, 
suddenly to fade again as quickly; her eyes were dark and 
dreamy, with a yearning tenderness; and on her lips was 
a smile, mournful yet proud, as, half-unconsciously, they 
uttered the Avords of her thoughts aloud: '‘I will not leave 
thee, no, nor yet forsake thee. Where thou goest I will 
go; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God 
They were the words of an oath — an oath to whose 
keeping she would dedicate her life, even though, to so 
keep it, that life would be in the world’s eyes condemned 
and sacrificed. She leant there, against the dark wood- 
work, alone, the silence unbroken that reigned about he*, 
save when the wind swept through the fragrant branches 


GRAN\aLLE DE VIGNE. 


443 


above, or the rush of a bird’s delicate wings cleft the air. 
Suddenly — in the stillness, while yet it was so distant that 
no other ear could have heard it — she caught a footfall 
while its sound was so faint that it did not break the silence, 
as the spaniel catches the step of his master while yet afar 
off; she lifted her head with a wild, eager grace that was 
natural to her as is its freedom to a flower, her eyes growing 
dark and humid in their expectancy and their great joy, 
her color changing swiftly with the force of a joy so keen 
that it trenched on anguish, with the hot vivid flush of a 
love strong as the life in which it is imbedded and entwined. 
Then, with a low, glad cry, she sprang, swift as an antelopo, 
to meet him, and to cling to him as she would have clung 
to him through evil and adversity, through the scorch of 
shame and the throes of death, through the taunts of the 
world and the ghastly terrors of the grave. 

For many moments De Vigne could find no words even 
to tell her that wliich she never dreamed of, that which 
panted on his lips; he held her in his arms, crushing her 
in one long, close embrace, meeting as those meet who 
would not spend one hour of their lives asunder. For 
many moments he bent over her, speechless, breathless, 
straining her madly to him, spending on her lips the pas- 
sion that found no fitting utterance in words; then, stifled 
and hoarse in its very agony of joy, his voice broke out: 

“You will be my wife — this day — this hour! Alma I 
thank God with me — I am free !” 

* ♦ ♦ * ♦ 

The day stole onward ; faintly from the far distance 
swung the silvery sound of evening bells; the low south 
winds stirred among the lilac-blossoms, shaking their rich 
fragrance out upon the air; the bees hummed themselves 
to slumber in the hearts of folded roses; the mellow 
airbei light grew deeper and clearer, while the first 


444 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


stars were coming out in the west, the day was passing 
onward, ere long to fade into twilight, ere long to sink into 
night. And as the rays of the western sun swept through 
the parted network of the leaves and fell about his feet, 
shining in the eyes of the woman he loved, and bathing 
her hair in light where it swept across his breast, De Yigne 
bowed his head in thanksgiving too deep for words; not 
alone for the passionate joy in which his life was steeped, 
not alone for his freedom from that deadly, curse that had 
been on him for so long — fruits of an early marriage — but 
for that hour, past yet still so near: so near that still he 
sickened at it, as men at the memory of some horrible 
death they have but by a hair’s-breadth escaped ; that 
hour when, for the first time in all his wayward, headlong, 
vehement manhood, he had resisted and flung off from 
him the temptation that, yielded to but for one brief fleet- 
ing instant, would, though mever tracked or known by 
man, have made him taste fire in every kiss of the lips he 
loved, quail before the light of the fairest day that dawned, 
and start in the sweat of agony, and wake in the terror of 
remembered guilt from his sweetest rest, his most delicious 
sleep; that hour in the forest solitude, when, goaded, 
taunted, reviled, maddened, he had been face to face with 
what he loathed, parted by her from what he loved, he 
had had strength enough to fling her from him, untouched, 
unharmed, unchastised, — that hour which had been the 
crowning temptation of Granville De Yigne’s life. He 
had had strength to cast it behind him with a firm hand, 
and had had strength to flee from it — fearing himself as 
the wisest and holiest among us need do in those dark 
hours that come to all when there is but a plank between 
ns and the fathomless abyss of some great guilt. 

And while the starlit night of the early summer stole 
onward toward the earth, De Yigne bowed his head ove? 


vrrvANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


4 45 

the woman who had cleaved to him through all, and would 
BO have cleaved howsoever his life had turned, whose arms 
were close about him, and whose warm lips were on his ; 
and while a deep and delicious joy steeped his present and 
his future in its own golden and voluptuous delight, he 
looked backward for one instant to his Past, and thanked 
God. 


II. 


ADIEU AU LECTEUrI 

The history is told I It is one simple enough and com- 
mon enough in this world, and merely traces out the evil 
that accrued to two men in the same station of life and in 
similar circumstances, although of widely different tem- 
peraments, from an error of judgment — the most fatal 
error that man can make — an Early Marriage. Both my 
friends took advantage of this liberty, you see, to tie them- 
selves again I I donH say in that respect, “Go thou and 
do likewise,” ami lecteur, if you be similarly situated, but 
rather, if you are free — keep sol A wise man, they say, 
knows when he is well off ! 

In the Times the other day, I read among the deaths, 
“At Paris, in her ninety-seventh year, Sarah, Viscountess 
Fantyre.” Gone at last, poor old woman, under the sod, 
where shrewdness and trickery and rouge and trump cards 
arc of no avail to her, though she held by them to the last. 
She died as she had lived, I hear, sitting at her whist- 
table, be-wigged and be-rouged, gathering her dirty, costly 
lace about her, quoting George Selwyn, dealing herself 
two honors and six trumps, picking up the guineas with a 
cunning twinkle of her monkeyish eyes, when Death tapped 
VOL. II. 38 


446 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


her on the brain, and old Fantyre was carried off the scene 
in an apoplectic fit; while her partner, the Comte de Bean- 
jeu, murmured over his tabatiere, “Pestel Death is hor- 
ridly ill bred ; he should have let us played the conqueror I” 

What memoirs the old woman might have left us — dirty 
ones, sans doute, but what memoirs of intrigues, plots, 
scandals, schemes — what rich glimpses behind the cards — 
what amusing peeps beneath the purple ! A great many 
people, though, are glad, I dare say, that the Fantyre ex- 
periences are not down in black and white, and no pub- 
lisher, perhaps, would have been courageous enough to 
risk their issue. They would have blackened plenty oi 
fair reputations had their , gunpowder burst; they would 
have offended a world which loves to prate of its morals, 
cackle of its purity, and double-lock its chamber-doors ; 
they would have given us keys to many skeleton cupboards, 
which we should have opened to turn away from more 
heart-sick than before ! 

Her protegee, the Trefusis, has in nowise gone off the 
scene, nor did she consent to drop down into a valet’s 
wife. Her exposee at Morehampton’s villa had been the 
most bitter thing life could have brought her, for she had 
read enough of Rochefoucauld to think with him, “le ridi- 
cule deshonore plus que le deshonneur.” She sought the 
friendly shadow of Notre-Dame de Lorette. Fearing her 
husband no longer, she bribed him no more; and if you 
like to see her any day, walk down the Rue Breda, or look 
out in the Pre Catalan for a carriage with lapis-lazuli 
liveries, dashing as the Montespan’s, and you will havo 
painted to you in a moment the full-blown magnificence 
(now certainly coarse, and I dare say only got up at in- 
finite trouble from Blanc de Perle and Bulli’s best rouge) 
of the quasi -milliner of Frestonhills. She has at present, 
en proie, a Russian prince, and thrives, a ravir, upon 


GRA mLLE DE VIGNE. 


447 


roubles. Ilei imperial sables are the envy of the Quar- 
tier; and as women who range under the Piratical Flag 
don’t trouble their heads with a Future, the Trefusis does 
not stop to think that she may end in le Maison Die.u, 
with a bowl of soupe maigre, when her beauty shall utterly 
have lost all that superb and sensual bloom that lured De 
Yigne in his hot youth to such deadly cost. 

“A young man married is a man that’s marred.” 

The stag with the grip of the stag-hound ever at his 
throat ; the antelope with the fangs of the tigress ever 
tearing his reeking flanks ; the racer yoked in the heavy 
galling shafts that he must drag behind him over stony 
roads till he faints and dies, still with his burden harnessed 
on him ; these unions were not worse than many of those 
marriages that are the bitter fruit of no sin, no fault, no 
error, but merely of a mistake ! — those marriages that are 
a bondage more cruel, more eternal, more unpitied than 
the captivity of Israel in Egypt ! 

“A young man married is a man that’s marred.” One 
wrote that who was more deeply skilled in the intricacies 
of the human heart, who saw more profoundly into the 
manifold varieties, the wayward and conflicting instincts 
of human life, than any by whom the world has since let 
itself be led and moulded. “Marred?” How can the 
man fail to be so who chooses his yoke-fellow for life in 
all the blind haste, the crude taste of his earlier years, 
when taste in all things alters so utterly from youth to 
manhood ? In what the youth of five-and-twenty thinks 
so wise, fair, excellent, half a score or a score years later 
on he sees but little beauty. In study, sport, literature, 
his preference changes much in the interval that parts his 
early from his matured years; I have heard young fellows 
in their college terms utterly recant in June all they swore 
by religiously in January, equally earnest and sincere, more- 


448 


ORANVILLE DE VIGNE.. 


over, in their recantation and their adoration ! Taste, bias, 
opinion, judgment, all alter as their judgment widens, their 
taste ripens, and their sight grows keener from longer mix- 
ing amid the world, and longer studying its varied views 
God help, then, the man who has taken to his heart and 
into his life a wife who, fair in his eyes in all the glamour 
of love, all the “purpureal light of youth,” is as insufficient 
to him in his maturer years as are the weaker thoughts, the 
cruder studies, the unformed judgment, the boyish revelries 
of his youth. The thoughts might be well in their way, the 
studies beneficial, the judgment generous and just, the revels 
harmless, but he has outgrown them — gone beyond them — ^ 
left them far behind him ; and he can no more return to 
them and find them sufficient for him than he can return to 
the Gradus ad Parnassura of his first school-days. So the 
wife, too, may be good in her way ; he may strive to be 
faithful to her and to cleave to her as he has sworn to do ; 
he may seek with all his might to come to her side, to bring 
back the old feeling, to join the broken chain, to find her 
all he needs and all he used to think her; he may strive 
with all his might to do this, but it is Sysiphus-labor ; she 
does not satisfy his manhood, the scales have fallen from 
his eyes, he loves her no longer I It is not his fault ; she 
belongs to the things of his youth that pleased a crude 
taste, an immature judgment; he sees her now as she fs, 
and she is far below him, far behind him ; if he progress 
he must go on alone, if he fall back to her level his mind 
deteriorates with every day that dawns I Would he bring 
to the Commons no arguments riper than the crude de- 
bates that were his glory at the Union ? would he condenc n 
himself in science never to discard the unsound theories 
that were the delight of his early speculations ? would he 
deny himself the right to fling aside the moonshine philos- 
ophies, the cobweb metaphysics that he wove in his youth, 


OKANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


449 


■and forbid himself title to advance beyond them ? Surely 
notl Yet he would chain himself through his lifelong to 
a yoke-fellow as unfit and insufficient to his older years as 
ever the theories and thoughts of his youth can be ; as fatal 
,to his peace while he is bound to her, as they, could he be 
bound to them, would be fatal to the mind they dwarfed, 
to the brain they crammed into a prison-cell I 

In youth Rosaline seems very fair, 

None else being by, 

Herself poised with herself in either eye. 

A young man meets a young girl in society, or at the 
.sea-side, or on the deck of a Rhine steamer; she has nice 
fresh coloring, bright-blue eyes, or black ones, as the case 
may be, very nice ankles, and a charming voice. She is a 
•pretty girl to everybody; to him, thrown across her by 
chance, she is beautiful — divine! He thinks, over his 
pipe, that she is just his ideal of (Enone, or Gretchen, or 
airy fairy Lilian, if he be of a poetic turn, and rank with 
.German idealism; or meditates that she’s “a clipper of a 
girl, and, by Jupiter! what lovely scarlet lips, and what a 
pretty foot !” if of a material disposition. He falls in love 
with her, as the phrase goes ; he flirts with her at water- 
parties, and pays her a few morning calls; he sees her 
trifling with a bit of fancy-work, and hears her pretty 
voice say a few things about the weather. A few oecU- 
lades, a few waltzes, a few tetes-a-tetes ; when looking at 
the rosebud lips he never criticises what they utter, and 
he proposes — be is accepted ; they are both dreadfully in 
love, of course, and — marry. It is a pretty dream for a 
few months; an easy yoke, perhaps, for a few years; then 
gradually the , illusions drop one by one, as the leaves drop 
from a shaken rose, loth, yet forced to fall. He finds her 
luind narrowed, bigoted, ill-stored, with no single thought 

38 * 


450 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


in it akin to bis own. What could he learn of it in those 
few morning calls, those few ball-room tetes-a-tetes, when 
the glamour was on him, and he would have cared nothing 
though she could not have spelled his name ? Or — he finds 
her a bad temper, (when does temper ever show in society, 
and how could he see her without society’s controlling eye 
upon her?) snarling at her servants, her dogs, the soup, 
the east winds; meeting him with petulant acerbity, re- 
venging on him her milliner’s neglect, her maid’s stupid- 
ity, her migraine, or her torn Mechlin. Or — he finds her 
a heartless coquette, cheapening his honor, holding his 
name as carelessly as a child holds a mirror, forgetting, 
like the child, that a breath on it is a stain; turning a 
deaf ear to his remonstrance; flinging at him, with a 
sneer, some died-out folly — “before 1 knew you, sir!” — 
that she has ferreted out; goading him to words that he 
knows, for his own dignity, were best unsaid, then turning 
to hysteria and se posent en martyre. Or — and this, I take 
it, is the worst case for both — the wife is a good wife, as 
many (ladies say most) wives are; he knows it, he feels it, 
he honors her for it, but — she is a bitter disappointment to 
him. He comes home worn out with the day’s labor, but 
successful from it; he sits down to a tete-a-tete dinner; he 
veils her of the hard-won election, the hot-worded debate 
in the House, the issue of a great law-case that he has 
brought off victorious, of his conquest over death by the 
bedside of a sinking patient, of the compliment to his 
corps from the commander-in-chief, of the one thing that 
is the essence of his life and the end of his ambition; she 
listens with a vague, amiable, absent smile, but her heart 
is not with him, nor her ear. “Yes, dear — indeed — how 
very nice I But cook has ruined that splendid haunch. Do 
look 1 it is really burnt to a cinder !” She never gives him 
any more than that! She cannot help it; she is a good 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


451 


patient, domestic, quiet woman, who would not do wrong 
for the world, but her sphere is the nursery, her thoughts 
center on the misdemeanors of her household, her mission 
is emphatically to “suckle fools and chronicle small-beer.” 
The perpetual drop, drop, of her small worries, her puerile 
pleasures, is like the ceaseless dropping of water on his 
brain ; try how he might, he could never waken this 
woman’s mind to one pulse in unison with his in the 
closest relationship of human life; she is less capable of 
understanding him in his defeats, his victories, his strug- 
gles, than the senseless writing-paper, which, though it 
cannot respond to them, at least lets him score his thoughts 
on its blank pages, and will bear them unobliterated ! Yet 
this disunion in union is common enough in this world: 
when a man marries early it is too generally certain. 

A man early married, moreover, is prematurely aged. 
While he is yet young his wife is old; while he is in the 
fullest vigor of his manhood, she is gray, and faded, and 
ageing; youth has long gone from her, while in him it is 
still fresh; and while away from her he is young, by her 
side he feels old. Married — in youth he takes upon him- 
self burdens that should never weigh save upon middle 
age ; in middle age he plays the part that should be 
reserved for age alone. I read the other day, in an essay, a 
remark of the writer’s relative to the marriage of Milver- 
ton, in the last series of Friends in Council, with a girl of 
twenty-two, in which he said that he could well conceive 
what a delight it might be to a man at or past middle age, 
who had believed his youth lost forever, to have it restored 
to him in a love which gives him the rich and subtle glad- 
ness that brings back the “ greenness to the grass and the 
glory to the flower.” It is true; and it is this later love 
which can satisfy him and not fade and disappoint him; 
since it is in later years alone that his own character will 


152 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE, 


have become no longer mutable, his own tastes have 
ripened, and his own judgment grown secure. Yet to the 
man who has married early, this resurrection of his youth 
can never come, or, if it come, can only come in bitterness, 
like the bitterness of the prisoner who catches one glimpse 
of the fair laughing earth lying beyond' in the sunlight, 
and knows that the bars of his cell are fixed, and that on 
his limbs are the weight of irons. 

And, to take it in a more practical sense, scarcely the 
less inevitably from every point is “a young man married 
a man that’s marred.” If to men of fortune, like Sabre- 
tasche and De Yigne, with every opiate of pleasure and 
excitement to drown the gall and fret of uncongenial or 
unhappy union, early marriage blots and mars life as it 
does, how much more bitter still to those who are poor and 
struggling men, with the burden of work, hardly done and 
scantily paid, upon their shoulders, is its fatal error 1 A 
young man starts in life with no capital, but a good educa- 
tion and a profession, that, like all professions, cannot be 
lucrative to him till time has mellowed his reputation, and 
experience made him, more or less, a name in it. It brings 
him quite enough for his garcon w^ants; he lives comfort- 
ably enough in his chambers or his lodgings, with no 
weightier daily outlay than his Cavendish and his chop; 
study comes easy to him, with a brain that has no care 
gnawing on it; society is cheap, for his chums come con- 
tentedly for a pipe, and some punch or some beer, and 
think none the worse of him because he does not give them 
turtle and Vin Mosseux. He can live for little if he like ; 
if he want change and travel, he can take his knapsack 
and a walking tour; nobody is dependent on him; if he 
be straitened by poverty, the strain is on him alone ; he ir 
not tortured by the cry of those who look to him for daily 
bread ; the world is before him, to choose at least where he 


GKA.\VlJ.JL.J!l i>Jfi VIUNE. 


453 


will work in it; in a word, he is free ! But, if he marries, 
his up-hill career is fettered by a clog that draws him 
backward every step he sets; his profession is inadequate 
to meet the expenses that crowd in on him ; if he keep 
manfully and honestly out of debt, economy and privation 
tfat his very life away, as, say what romancists may, they 
ever must; if he live beyond his income, as too many pro- 
fessional men are almost driven to do in our day, there u 
a pressure upon him like the weights ^they laid upon 
offenders in the old Newgate press-yards. He toils, he 
struggles, he works, as brain-workers must, feverishly and 
at express speed to keep in the van at all ; he is old, while 
by right of years he should yet be young, in the constant 
harassing rack and strain to “keep up appearances,’’ and 
seem well off while every shilling is of consequence; he 
writes for his bread with the bray of brawling children 
above his head ; he goes to his office turning over and 
over in wretched arithmetic the suras he owes to the baker 
and the butcher; he smiles courteously upon his patients 
or his clients with the iron in his soul and county-court 
summonses hanging over his head. He goes back from 
his rounds or his office, or comes out of his study after a 
long day, jaded, fagged, worn out; comes, not to quiet, to 
peace, to solitude, with a Havana and a book, to any- 
thing that would soothe the fagged nerves and ease the 
strain for an hour at least, but only for some miserable 
petty worry, some fresh small care ; to hear his wife going 
into mortal agonies because her youngest son has the 
measles, or bear the leer of the servants when they say 
“the tax-gatherer’s called again, and, please, must he go 
away ?” 

Corregio literally dying in the heat and burden of the 
day, of the weary weight, the torturing rack of home-cares, 
his family and his poverty dragging him downward and 


454 


GRANVILLE DE VIGNE. 


clogging his genius as the drenching rains upon its wings 
clog the flight of a bird, is but sample of the death-in-Iife, 
the age-in-youth, the self-begotten curse, the self-elected 
doom, that almost inevitably dog the steps of a man who 
has married early, be his station what it may, be his choice 
what it will. 

This Spring of Love reserableth 
The uncertain glory of an April day, 

Which shows now all the beauty of the sun, 

And by-and-by a cloud takes all away! 

Such is love, rarely anything better, scarcely ever any- 
thing more durable. Such are all early loves, invariably, 
inevitably. God help, then, though we may count them by 
the myriad, those who in and for that one brief “April 
day,” which, warm and shadowless at morning, sees the 
frost down long before night, pay rashly as Esau paid in 
the moment of eager delight, when no price was counted 
and no value asked; pay, with headstrong thoughtless- 
ness, in madman’s haste, the one priceless birthright upon 
earth — Freedom ! 

“A young man married is a man that’s marred I” 


■■D or VOL. u 




